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Tactile tactics

Tamara Christensen, director of research at R&D/Leverage—Integrated Solutions in Plastics and Industrial Design, talks about the importance of a package’s tactile properties.

Packaging World: What do you mean by “tactile tactics” and what is the connection with package design?

Tamara Christensen:
It’s a method for determining consumer interest by privileging the sense of touch as the key element in the consumer’s experience of a brand. No one operates with just one sense: visual, kinesthetic, auditory, tactile. So it isn’t as if you’re setting out to design a package based only on touch, just as you wouldn’t set out to design a package based only on sight. Rather it’s an attempt to isolate the senses in certain activities and then bring them back together to see how they fit. By conducting activities with consumers based exclusively on tactility—for example, having people put their hand in a bag and hold a container they can’t see and then asking them to talk about what they are holding—we can eliminate that overwhelming reliance people tend to have on what they can see. At the same time, we gain tremendous insight into what they think about how a thing feels.

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