Towards 'feeling-with': A speculative proposal for a relational design aesthetics of tactile affect

We think of touch most readily as a physical, bodily sense, as immediate skin contact through our hands or fingertips. In modern philosophy and contemporary culture, the tactile sense is often defined in reductionist terms, as mere pleasant and fleeting sensations, overlooking the manifold senses and affective meanings of touch. Touch is a compound sense: it involves not only skin contact, but also the sense of movement, balance, position in space, and internal sensations. The tactile sense roots and connects us with the material world. Through touching, we become acquainted with ourselves and with what is other than us. Touch is unavoidably reciprocal: it implies both ‘touching’ and ‘being touched’. More than a purely bodily sense, touching involves a relationality that is felt in the body as palpable visceral affect and comes with an instinctive urge to reach out or withdraw. Moreover, there is an affinity between this affective touching and feelings of sympathy and empathy.

Departing from this expanded sense of touch as ‘tactile affect’, as a mode of being and relating to the physical world, this thesis explores how design things exert such an affective presence, how they reach out to us, touch us, and demand we touch them back. It constitutes a speculative proposal, what Daniela Rosner refers to as a “critical fabulation” (2018), for a more-than-human aesthetic paradigm for “design things” (Wakkary, 2021), using the relational figure of the ‘tactile’ as a bodily, phenomenological resonance and as an agential quality of matter. Post-human theories have conceptualised affective touch as a bodily, precognitive feeling that is independent from meaning, which risks perpetuating Cartesian binary divides. Drawing on Charles S. Peirce’s doctrine of signs and further developments in biosemiotics and physiosemiotics, I argue that the palpable visceral force in aesthetic encounters with design things is not a-signifying but emerges from the continuous action of signs (semiosis) as an Interpretant effect. Not to be conflated with modes of symbolic, linguistic representation, ‘signification’ and ‘meaning’ operate prior to human meaningmaking and are continuous across nature as non-conscious (and non-intentional) sign relations.

Design things exist in the physical, natural world, but they are also known and experienced as objects in species-specific semiotic life-worlds or Umwelten; they are both ontological and phenomenological and require a relational, more-than-human framework. Peirce’s evolutionary metaphysics is the only one to fully integrate phenomenological categories of experiential consciousness and meaning-based cognition with ontological ones, effectively uniting mind and matter. By means of semiotic analyses and interviews with designer-makers, I trace how design things manifest iconic and indexical sign relations and consider the mutability of human intentionality and material agency therein. Conceiving of self-organising operations in matter as constitutively semiotic processes or “semiotic correspondences” (Prodi, 1977, 1988), I propose an alternative conception of agency in terms of ‘material touchings’ that are negotiated in the design process and are cognised as bodily, tactile resonance. This work is foremost a contribution to design philosophy, ontology, and aesthetic theory and advocates a shift towards new forms of animating, affecting, touching, and ‘feeling-with’ non-human others.