Web design shares with all electronic media a profound limitation: it cannot communicate the feeling of a person’s immediate space; it cannot communicate the feeling of a person. Web design has no sense of touch.

It’s a bit of an irony that tools that put us “in touch” with faraway others can’t actually allow us to share space with them, let alone feel the change in the air as they enter a room, the strength of their handshake upon introduction, or the hint of their perfume. “Reach out and touch someone” was the famous AT&T slogan that every four year old knew—and that every four year old knew was, well, a reach.

And it’s a shame, because the sense of touch—literally, and in the general sense of the shared experience of space—is the essential sense. It’s what makes or breaks you. (Take, for example, emperor and polyglot Frederick II, who wanted to discover the “original” language that people would speak if they never heard a language. He took newborn babies and instructed their foster mothers to bathe and feed them, but not to fondle, pet, or talk to them. Every child died.) There is nothing so important to a person’s mental and ultimately physical well-being than the belief that at least one person shares their experience of the world. Electronically, what else are blogs for, then? Or Web 2.0? Or good design? They’re there to share. But none of these is physical. And none is as pleasing as, say, a pat on the back.

But now to backtrack. . . .

Here, on the obstetrical ward, is a double sink in a little room—a chrome faucet, two basins and drains, just like any kitchen sink. There is a counter on the left, and a counter on the right. Overhead, a long heat lamp lights and warms the two counters and the sink.

This is where they wash the newborns like dishes. A nurse, one or another, spends most of an eight-hour shift standing here at the sink.

Different nurses bring in newborns, one after another, and line them down the counter to the sink’s left. The newborns wear flannel blankets. Knit hats the size of teacups keep sliding off their wet heads. Their faces run the spectrum from lavender through purple and red to pink and beige.

You don’t feel the warmth of the heat lamps or the water, as author Annie Dillard describes them in her book For the Time Being. You can’t feel the eight-hour ache in the nurse’s legs. You can’t touch the flannel or the knitting or the slick foreheads.

But can’t you, just? Of course.

Web design may have no sense of touch, but neither does the written word. The difference, at present, is that the written word has had time to develop its language for communicating touch, to get what a person sees on the page to trigger the participation of imagination and, more importantly, tactile memory.

Web design is slowly developing its own language for the sense of touch, as well as generally for shared space. Design standards contribute to this development by providing a consistent experience of the web.

What will further this development? It could be something we’re told all the time: design with an actual person in mind. Don’t think of your site as a collection of visual elements. Don’t think of it as HTML or CSS or PHP. Don’t even think of it as page.

Think of it as a room you can walk into and shake someone’s hand.

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