Let Chaos Reign: Q&A with haptics expert, Cheryl Akner-Koler
Haptics: Haptic perception (Greek: haptόs “palpable”, haptikόs “suitable for touch”) is usually referred to as the sense of touch. However, it literally means the ability “to grasp something.” Touch involves experiences of texture, temperature and vibration, perceived by the nervous system through the skin. As soon as touch includes intentional muscle movement, such as grasping a 3-D volume and sensing its weight, proportions, density and shape, and picking up a tool to use it, we transcend touch and tactility and experience haptics (Lederman, S. & Klatzky, R. (1987).
Cheryl Akner-Koler’s interests pivot around the notion that everyday aesthetic experiences drive creative processes. In order for her to observe this process, she’s learned to see her work through the prism of complexity and chaos. After all, movement is often unpredictable, and can result in pleasure, pain, and everything in between. The practical applications of this understanding have enormous potential. The HAPTICA project that Akner-Koler heads up is hard at work developing a scientific path within the field of aesthetics that emphasizes haptic aspects of movement, touch, taste and smell in relation to a creative gestalt process. Reaching an understanding for this path is an interdisciplinary endeavor, and for HAPTICA it’s all hands on deck: In collaboration with teachers and researchers from the Culinary Arts & Meal Science at the Grythyttan School of Hospitality in Sweden, Akner-Koler is building the next wave of haptics knowledge. She sat with Designit to discuss how experiencing the world differently inspires new patterns of learning, which in turn will make us more empathetic and help us design for a more complex future.
Matters: You work with sensory experiences in haptics. Why is that important for design?
Cheryl: In the HATICA project we explore tangible sensory experiences to trigger people’s imaginations and engage their emotions. Parallel with this project I worked with Cristine Sundbom in 2016 in a pilot project funded by the Swedish innovation group Vinnova, to help elderly women share their experiences at Arvika Hospital by using what we called “haptic aesthetic laborations (A-Lab).” In this case, the haptic and tangible object in the lab was a fly-fishing lure. You see, haptics is both about how texture, temperature, vibration, contours, etcetera are perceived by the nervous system through the skin and the manual use of our hands, mouth and body.
The fly-fishing lure was a useful crafting project for approaching a low prioritized group of sick elderly female bodies from a gender perspective. We paired the women in an A-Lab session and encouraged them to ask one another questions and share their intimate experiences as they bound fly-fishing hooks with string and feathers. By crafting and sharing together, we developed a compassionate, gender-critical service design method for documenting patient testimonials. The same lessons are currently being applied to other service-design experiences.
Matters: Do you think the world is becoming more complex?
Cheryl: It has always been complex, however we now experience this complexity though digital media where we are often overwhelmed with input. We can however slow it down and frame it to explore different kinds of learning patterns. We tend to see fragments of things rather than making sense of the whole picture, and that contributes to our general feeling of stress. Instead of trying to know everything, or know only fragments, we should be more psychologically nimble and playful about how we perceive rather than know the world. My feeling is that we don’t play enough. Play is our first aesthetic experience as a child and is one way of introducing new learning patterns.
Matters: How can we support more variety in learning and playfulness into society?
Cheryl: Having a more design-educated world is a start. Kids in school should be encouraged to take a design approach when learning about the world so facts gain meaning. Let them have time to hack things instead of always learning things in a step-by-step manner. We should be encouraged to play with phenomena and understand the inherent complexities in the system as it undergoes changes.
Matters: What is the biggest risk you see in society right now?
Cheryl: The biggest risk is losing ourselves in our keyboards and behind our screens. If you don’t use your body actively — dance, climb trees, build prototypes! — then you don’t acquire skills! Without engaged and intentional movement you’ll become disembodied and lose connection with your self and the people and things around you. Your learning and growth processes will regress. You are not expanding your intelligence.
Matters: And one way of doing this is simply to get outside more?
Cheryl: Yes, because you need intellectual and spatial expansion — a sense of the physical world — to remain human. Taxi drivers in London are a good example of people who have an expanded spatial understanding, because before they even get their licenses they have to develop a complex understanding of how to navigate the streets.
Matters: Does expanding our spatial world shift our perception of reality?
Cheryl: I know that you need to have a little freedom with your time and space. By expanding our spatial perspective where we include emptiness, voids and the formlessness we can create a healthy distance to the tangible aspects of the world. Our world is made up of matter that is structured on the microscopic level of an atom as 99.999999999999 percent empty space. So to only emphasize the tangible material aspects of form is not in accordance with the deep underlying “reality” which is hidden beneath the surface.
We have to adopt to more of a learning view of life that recognizes that life is not as stable as it looks; it is in a constant flux. So to shift back and forth between the tangible everyday phenomena to a deeper perception of the intangible is helpful. Lara Boyd, Director of the Brain Behaviour Laboratory at the University of British Colombia, researches the neuroplasticity of the brain and how our brain can restructure itself. Empirical evidence shows that putting yourself in situations where your body is doing and learning new and different things will change the structure of your brain throughout your entire life! Even if you don’t do it “right” you will learn.
Matters: You teach aesthetics…how can aesthetics help designers push limits and better understand the world?
Cheryl: For me, aesthetics is about being engaged and exploring the world through our senses. Aesthetics is not just about the tangible aspects of the world — it is also about learning to regard space as being just as important as physical form, and temporal changes as important as stable materials. When I teach new students I start in the stable world where form activates and encloses space, and then shift to experimenting with more temporal phenomena like smoke that blends particles with space. I enjoy looking at things that undergo temporal changes. It’s a different aspect of design that few think about. By cultivating an open aesthetic attitude that includes solid forms in relation to open spaces and to temporal phenomena that undergo change, we can be better prepared to learn about the world. The design process should be about learning.
Matters: Can understanding different learning styles help us find new ways to tackle the complexities we’re facing in the future?
Cheryl: The fact that we don’t expect different people to have unique learning styles hinders us from interpreting things in varied ways. Aesthetics engages our senses and stimulates our emotions, which is crucial for learning complex processes, because we are better able to form our intentions and find meaning. The expertise we should develop involves more chaotic and emotional ways of being in the world. Neuroscience tells us that we cannot deal with a complex situation without emotions or subjectivity. This is why the natural sciences are facing a dilemma today as we shift from singular and linear systems to more multi- dimensional and non-linear systems. To collect and classify data in a linear way can only be useful if someone can see value in the information. We cannot learn and make sense of the world by consuming unprocessed information. We need to create a relationship with the world and be prepared to accept that we all learn in quite different ways depending on our sensibilities, backgrounds, and biases, which help or hinder us from understanding the present situation and anticipating the future.
Matters: Can understanding complexity help us evolve the way we think about our lives and our futures?
Cheryl: Complexity is just a way of zooming in and then zooming out until you find the right distance where you can recognize patterns that make sense to you. When you learn, you don’t have to put everything into clearly defined and isolated boxes. We need to get comfortable with this idea. In quantum physics, you can’t put anything into an isolated box, because the box is placed in a context and the movements and forces in the environment around the box will affect the operations in the box. There is a general expectation that we want to get to something real or definite, but you can’t. I actually want the future to be more complex in the way that we can deal with complexity and chaos! Complexity is on the edge of chaos. So if you don’t learn how to be okay with chaos, then you’ll never be able to push the limits of complexity.
