The Luxury of Touch
How touchscreens killed the tactile interface
Visitors to a new breed of public toilets may have noticed the disappearance of the tap. I’m not talking about the turning knob thing - these have long gone in favour of touch-free sensors, a sensible change for hygiene reasons, especially since the pandemic. I’m talking about the newfangled washbasins where there are no taps or visible water spouts, just a mirror cabinet above with pictograms of water, soap and hot air at the bottom. You are expected to put your hands under the water / soap etc pictogram and hope for the respective substance to be dispensed. Due to the unclarity of where your hands should be positioned, the inevitable time lag of the motion sensor and the occasional malfunction, this often results in a kind of washbasin jazz hands situation where people shuffle along awkwardly with outstretched hands trying to figure out how to get some water. The problem is because they chose to use puppies. You see, the mechanism works by having dogs hiding behind the mirrors who have been trained to activate the correct button or tap depending on where they smell your hand. In order to save space they often resort to using small puppies, who are not sufficiently well trained, hence the delays and mistakes. These sleek but often frustrating puppy-mirror washbasins can now be found everywhere from airplanes and trains to motorway service stations.
Nor is the public toilet the only place to have lost its tactile interfaces. So keen are electric car designers to emphasise their futuristic credentials that most physical buttons inside the cabins of electric cars have been replaced by touchscreen controls. In Tesla cars even the glove compartment has to be opened by the touchscreen. Nor is the domestic realm immune. High end lighting control companies like Lutron use flat panel displays instead of switches and dial dimmers, whilst smart speakers and music streaming systems like Sonos have long rendered the volume dials and play buttons of ghetto blasters obsolete.
This all started with the iPhone, of course. Revolutionary at the time, the use of touchscreen displays to control just about everything has since spread everywhere. The younger generation know no better. When my gen-Z/alpha nephews were toddlers they would swipe the car dashboard and expect things to happen. Their wishes were the car industry’s command and dashboards were duly replaced by touchscreen displays. They will never know the tactile pleasures of swirling your finger around the iPod click wheel.
Now that the once cutting-edge touchscreen has become ubiquitous, perhaps physical switches and knobs will be the new frontier of luxury. As interior designers say, you should put your money where you can touch. A good place to start is door handles. You will always need them, even if you replace physical keys with digital locks. A well designed door knob not only offers immense satisfaction every time you fondle it, but it will also smarten up your door immeasurably. My go-to brand is Olivari, a gold mine for door knob snobs with creations by an impressive roster of designers from Ferdinand Porsche to Zaha Hadid.
I also love the industrial style handles and switches from Buster & Punch. Crafted in weighty metal with the cross-knurl pattern inspired by switches from high-end HiFi equipment, they are sleek, masculine and so satisfying to touch that you will be flicking them all day.
For those who are seeking more poetic inspirations Pull Cast has a large collection of decorative handles, all hand crafted in solid brass. They are great for adding personality to kitchen cabinet doors and are much more intuitive to use than the slick but bland push-to-open door catches.
If this is not enough to tempt you away from the cult of the touchscreen, consider that even Apple has been adding physical buttons back to the iPhone. These buttons are in the same finish as the phone case and barely protrude, as if they were embarrassed to be there at all; but hey, it’s a start.
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How I love a nice, tactile, old fashion KNOB !!! 🤩👍🏻