Touch Decisions: For Heritage Objects

Figures & data

Figure 1. Two children learning about carrying water: weight, movement, balance, etc. at Dyffryn Gardens, NT Wales.

Figure 2. Forms of Haptic Exploration from Sekuler and Blake (2006).

Figure 3. A child exploring the tactile experience of carding wool.

Table 1. Potential institutional benefits of touch.

• Satisfy funder needs

• Satisfy supporter needs

• Transmission of knowledge

• Experiential authenticity

• Enjoyment/entertainment

• Diversification of the use of space within the institution

• Increased involvement

• Share meaning and significance with a community

• Supports fundraising

• Legal and moral duty to include

Figure 4. Greyfriars Bobby in Edinburgh has only recently attracted patting of the nose.

Table 2. Factors to be taken into consideration when planning touch arrangements, each point is discussed in more detail in the text below.

Decision-making criteria for touching cultural heritage:	Example
Benefits to individuals	Touching grandmother's birth certificate
Benefits to institutions	Good reviews on social media
Specific user needs	Tactile access for partially sighted art historian
Stakeholder priority	Restriction on access to sacred places
Understanding of materials and decay functions	Measuring extent and rate of the erosion of surfaces
Rigorous scientific experimentation	Fold testing paper
Vulnerabilities	An old-fashioned typewriter with a return lever
Health and Safety	A sword blade on open display
Known safe	Defaulting to a system that is known to remove the hazard such as removing all illumination
Tolerance limits	Allowing humidity fluctuations of 10% based on historical records of even larger changes
Combined properties	Implications of the form of binding of a book
Whole collection needs and opportunities	Existence of multiple similar quilts in collection allowing one to be handled
Technological possibilities	Production of 3D printer
Explicit Risk	The organization's approach to risks which may feel different in an open-air folk museum or an art gallery
Risk Appetite
explicit risk	How much damage the organization expects to tolerate from the handling. Are you prepared to have this impressionist painting / roman roof tile slightly chipped after the school visit?
Risk tolerance
Risk Consequence	If this object gets broken, will it be considered the result of a conservator's error in judgement?
Sustainability	A complex in situ barrier that cannot be maintained by the managers of the heritage space.
Lifetimes	Keeping things for unknown future users at the expense of current users (perhaps ignoring issues of past exclusion)
Authentic practice	Respecting embodied wisdom for example by seeking and following traditional modes of care for collections such as pest management by smoking

Sekuler, Robert, and Randolph Blake. 2006. Perception. 5th ed. New York: McGraw-Hill.

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