How Do Books Feel?
How Do Books Feel? is an exploration into the function and tactility of books. In our ever-more digitised reality, I believe it is important to reevaluate the way in which we understand the things that surround us. As we read from screens rather than pages, it is possible we are separating ourselves from an essential part of reader experience: touch.
This research-driven investigative inquiry allowed me to deconstruct and cross-examine the way in which books are experienced. Archival and field research, making and material experimentation led me to classify my examination into five distinct areas of book function:
1. the book as a vessel for information,
2. the book as a physical object,
3. the book as an arrangement of pages,
4. the book as an article made from paper,
5. the book as a record of touch.
Pictured below are the physical manifestations and explanations of these categories. Readers are invited to read through the books in order; each one reflecting the varying functions and forms of books in different ways.
Watch how each book is handled here.