Hsu Wai Lun
A tactile handle
“As Otl Aicher writes in his essay Greifen und Begreifen (“Grasping with Hand and Mind”), anyone threading a needle by hand manoeuvres the thread towards the needle's eye with their fingers. If the operation is unsuccessful, the eye reports the outcome to the person’s brain, which transmits a control command to their hand and the closed loop can be repeated.”
May our senses guide us
Hsu Wai Lun
We essentially live in a visually centred world and we designers generally rely on our eyesight when conceiving and fashioning things. Should we lose our eyesight, it will not be easy to find our way about in cities in which space is intensively divided up.
I have attempted in this work to minimise visual dominance and to instead focus on another of the senses – that of touch. How can we gain access to information by touching a door? How can a door be made more accessible?
detail of braille and tactile letters
A door handle as information medium
I came to realise in the course of my research that a great deal of information relating to entrances and exits is conveyed visually: “Push”, “Pull”, “Exit” etc. The first draft of my design, therefore, was a non-visual tool designed to help those with visual impairments to find the door handle and way in.
I began by assessing a variety of shapes with a view to forming a pattern that pointed the way. I developed a modular design system comprising a set of six knobs of differing angles of inclination.
The user is able to receive signals: the closer they come to the door handle, the more clearly arched the knob becomes.
final design: the shape’s slope (from little to large), which indicates the direction of the entrance/exit.
I tried to integrate the functions of the previous drafts in my final design as a means of making the door and handle accessible to the visually impaired whilst simultaneously providing them with additional information on the spaces and places involved.
The upshot is a door handle conceived for the acts of either entering from outside or exiting from inside, a push-pull door. The design focuses on our sense of touch. The sloping shape (change of size) and elongated styling of this handle indicates the direction of the entrance and exit.
The closer the handle is to the entrance, the larger it becomes. Additional information on the space and location (e.g. house number) is furnished at each end of the handle in braille and tactile letters.
Everything is interconnected
Otl Aicher investigated the relationship between a person’s thought and body, between the way they see and act, in an essay entitled Greifen und Begreifen (“Grasping with Hand and Mind”). Vision plays a crucial role in this cycle.
It can be confirmed that it is safe to proceed thus in tandem with thought. As Aicher emphasized: “Ergo: mind, eye and hand are to be regarded as engaging in an intermeshing sphere of activity."
a tactile handle from several perspectives
a tactile handle from several perspectives