Tactile Interfaces
Material vocabulary for screen design
A two-week workshop translating physical materials — paper, fabric, glass — into interface motion vocabularies. Outputs include a small zine of design tokens drawn from observation rather than convention.
The premise
Most interface motion vocabularies are inherited — “ease-in”, “ease-out”, “spring”. They describe the math, not the feeling. Tactile Interfaces was a two-week workshop that asked participants to start somewhere stranger: a physical material.
The setup
Each of [N] participants chose a material — a strip of waxed paper, a piece of velvet, a folded handkerchief, a sheet of glass — and was asked to describe its motion in writing, then in code.
The constraint: no using the standard easing names. You had to invent the language.
What came out
- A zine of [N] custom easing curves, named things like “the flick of a page,” “the breath of an envelope,” and “the slow give of a bookbinding.”
- A small CSS library of those easings, free to use.
- A surprising amount of agreement on what felt right — even though the language was idiosyncratic.
What I learned
- Naming is design. The act of naming a motion is the first time most participants felt they had taste about it.
- The standard easing names are an accidental cage. Worth escaping more often.
Add photos of the workshop, screenshots of the easings in motion, and links to the zine here.