Emma Fukuwatari Huffman

Magnet is a communication design duo bridging communities with various abilities in senses; seeing/blind, hearing/deaf. Natsumi and Kosuke, the amazing duo and friends of mine, invited me to design and create a larger version of their game Touch Match (たっちまっちカード), a game similar to Memory, but instead of finding matching numbers the players must find pairs of cards with the same texture only though the sense of touch. The player who collects the most pairs within one minute is the winner.

I was asked to design and produce a larger version of Touch Match for their exhibition Touch Match Planet at Dutch Design Week (DDW) 2024. A new Touch Match that can be sense by a larger surface of our bodies; a bigger and softer Touch Match made of fabric. After brainstorming and touching around, I realized how many textures of fabric there was in a home. So, I created 8 pairs of cushions out of a combination of fabrics found in my little apartment e.g. a towel, upholstery fabric, raincoat, pillow case and an IKEA storage sack.

Day 1 of DDW had begun and Touch Match Soft was being put to the test! In the videos I received from Kosuke, I saw that players were either throwing the cushions at each other to interfere with the opponents search, or hoarding as many cushions as they could in hopes for the maximum number of pairs within what they could collect. The players were giggling and seemed to be having fun, but there was not much attention given towards the texture and sensation of the fabrics. I was feeling dishearten because it felt like a design flaw of the product.

Mid-way into DDW, friend and Artistic Researcher Arne Hendriks visited and noticed the aggression the game brought about in the players. He suggested that it needed a new rule. Through playing, him and his friend made a new rule for Touch Match Soft; one player describes the texture of the cushion of choice, and the other searches for the pair, played with all eyes of all players closed. The two must work together to find as many matching pairs as they wish.

With this new rule, suddenly, the game became an extremely quiet and mindful game. Players would search for words to convey what they are feeling, ask questions and listen to the sounds the fabrics make. Nothing about the cushions had changed, only the rules. From aggressively playing to win to working together by searching for words, imagining what the other is experiencing and listening to the other and to the sounds of the materials. Working with Magnet has gave me many new insights, renewed hope and excitement for the power of creativity.