Force, flatness and touch without feeling: Thinking historically about haptics and buttons

Abstract

In recent years, concerns have cropped up about the disappearance of analog buttons in favor of flat, slick touchscreens that ask little from their users’ fingers beyond swipes, touches, and taps. This form of interfacing has generated concerns both about usability and about how users relate tactilely and affectively with digital media. This article suggests that worries about these discursive and material shifts related to finger force and flat design continue a conversation begun >100 years ago when the very concept of a “button” was new. Stitching together past and present, this study identifies a persistent struggle to make sense of how humans touch and feel machines, with questions about user agency, labor, individuality, and authentic engagement coming to the fore. Additionally, it makes a case for encouraging scholars to work at the intersection of history and haptic media systems.

Listen up! Phatic thresholds and sound interface design

“…The commercial "low-key" rationale of sound interface design supporting the "keynote sounds" phatic alignment is consistent with other trends in user interface design aimed at creating a "natural" and "seamless" interaction, such as flattening buttons and touch screens (Plotnick, 2017). Leading technology companies suggest that the next significant innovation at the intersection of AI, software, and hardware is the introduction of devices that are "radically helpful," as explained by Rick Osterloh, SVP at Google: They're there when you need them, they're simple to use, and they anticipate your needs.…”

“…Scholarship addressing the cultural aspects of HCI mostly considers its graphic and pictorial contents, portraying this interaction as anchored in the sense of sight, and recognizing the interface as an esthetic form that follows visual traditions such as print, photography, cinema, comics, and maps (Chun, 2005; Drucker, 2011; Galloway, 2012; Parks, 2004). In recent years, scholars, increasingly cognizant of the haptic and gestural features of the user interface, have traced its history (Parisi, 2018; Plotnick, 2017) and examined how hand movements and body-proxies (like the mouse) are integrated into the interface, making the screen into an operative space (Frosh, 2018a; Verhoeff and Cooley, 2014). However, there is still a paucity in scholarship addressing the functional and cultural aspects of sound interfaces.…”

Digital touch for remote personal communication: An emergent sociotechnical imaginary

“…The persistence of buttons, even in the context of digital whole-body interfaces, is suggestive of an emergent sociotechnical imagination of touch embedded in ideas of human versus machinic touch and affect (Paterson, 2007: 115): that is, touch as a significant human agentive action preceeding the digital or entailing a merging of different machinic and organic ‘bodies of production’ (Manning, 2007: 93). The prototypes articulated concerns about living in a ‘touchless’ world and a desire to return to more physical controls, responsive, ‘real’ and tactile textured feeling (Plotnick, 2017). This can be seen, we argue, as an incidence of resisting ‘new epistemological ordering and deployment of the senses’ in respect to the tactile modernity of the twentieth century (Parisi, 2011: 210).…”

Primordial Haptics, 1925–1935: Hands, Tools and the Psychotechnics of Prehistory

“…In this connection, and naturally perhaps in this age of touch screens, pressure sensors and track pads, recent scholarship has tended to gravitate towards telling (pre)histories of haptic ‘media’ – tracing out that particular regime, if you will, of vibro- and electrotactility, its laboratory origins and lineages and the ways the senses of touch thus became embroiled, eventually, with questions of signal transduction, communication, interactivity, sensory substitution and so on (e.g. Mills, 2011; Parisi, 2018; Parisi and Archer, 2017; Plotnick, 2017). As David Parisi puts it, touch’s 19th-century (and ongoing) ‘enclosure in the lab’ had lasting consequences, shaping conceptions of ‘the haptic’ (and haptic interfaces) to this day (2018: 17).…”