Lukas Dittrich

“The present work is in no way intended to discriminate against people with visual impairments but, drawing on Otl Aicher’s essay greifen und begreifen (“grasping with hand and mind”), merely seeks to achieve a deeper understanding of non-visual routines.” I based my work on Otl Aicher’s essay greifen und begreifen (“grasping with hand and mind”). My groundwork saw me investigating the correlations between grasping with hand and mind respectively, permutations such as “grasping by gripping” and parallels in, for instance, the Montessori educational system: “The right learning material for children arouses their curiosity and prioritises practical experience over the imparting of theoretical knowledge. This allows them to grasp the world through what they do as opposed to simply memorising knowledge taught abstractly.”

I sought in my theoretical deliberations to unravel the act of grasping step by step and in the process stumbled across an operating cycle delineated by Ott Aicher: “mind, eye and hand are to be regarded as parts of an intermeshing operating cycle.”

It struck me as interesting here that Aicher suddenly adds our eyes to the equation. Though he was right, I’m sure, the acts of grasping with hand and mind are, as I see it, more readily assignable to the sphere of haptics. Thinking in this way brought me to the subject of braille – a form of writing for the blind facilitated by a process of grasping by touch. I then proceeded to compare and contrast the two cognitive grasping processes – with and without visual impairment.

I based my work on one of Otl Aicher’s pictograms, the football symbol from the 1972 Olympic Games. It is possible to draw certain parallels here, the main difference being that visually impaired persons are more likely to perceive a kind of spatial image when grasping anything. Dr Morton Heller describes this very aptly:
“Using touch, they get a sense of space – that´s not visual, it´s just spatial.”