New works — continuous tactile registration

A while ago, I was invited to a design workshop. At the end of it, we were each asked to isolate a sense and construct an object, or an experience, around it. I chose the sense of touch and, consequently, designed a spatial experience that attempted to heighten bodily awareness through continuous tactile engagement.

After that experience, I became fixated on tactility as a primary mode of knowing and encountering objects, and what that might mean in the context of footwear — a category of design that is typically engineered toward sensory reduction and comfort.

Comfort, in its contemporary understanding, often functions as the elimination of friction. But perhaps, in optimising away friction, we may also be optimising away experience itself.

This series of works re-interprets our existing forms and orients them around a tactile condition by manipulating the leather into creating textures that disrupt the expected smoothness of the insole. Not enough to disrupt comfort, but enough to resist perceptual disappearance. The foot does not settle into passive comfort, it remains engaged and subtly activated, introducing a continuous, low-level sensation that does not resolve. And because it does not resolve, the body cannot fully adapt to it.

The wearer becomes aware of their own movement, and the subtle shifts in balance and weight that usually go unnoticed. Walking, which is typically reduced to function, becomes perceptible again as a sustained awareness of contact.

These pieces focus less on the object itself and more on the conditions it produces. They reinsert the body into its own experience and counteract the habitual drift toward abstraction that defines much of contemporary life.