Tactile Exploration Principles
Tactile exploration principles
- Touch is generally associated with hands but extends to the whole body, allowing perception of temperature, texture and form.
- For larger objects, verbal description complements tactile exploration.
- Systematic exploration helps understand spatial relationships and surface characteristics.
From the image to the form
The creative process differs depending on visual ability:
- Low vision: mental images come from residual vision, light memories or contrast perception. Participants use a hybrid visual-tactile approach, high-contrast colours and adjusted working distances while maintaining visual-spatial references.
- Acquired blindness: past visual memories are translated into tactile information. The process involves reconversion from visual to haptic code, attention to proportions and spatial relations, and integration of visual memory with tactile perception.
- Congenital blindness: mental images are fully haptic, built from previous tactile experiences, spatial body mappings and analogies with known objects. Perception is sequential, topological and dynamic, evolving during exploration.