A shared vocabulary for how a mechanism feels. Eleven axes, each one a dial that can be set independently of the others.
Most conversation about these objects runs out of words fast. Something is “smooth” or “snappy” or “satisfying,” and two people using the same word often mean opposite things. That vagueness is not a failure of enthusiasm — it is a missing vocabulary.
The Feel Map is that vocabulary. It separates tactile experience into axes that can be described, compared, and eventually measured. Two sliders with identical dimensions and materials can sit at opposite ends of four of these axes and feel like unrelated products. Naming the axes is what makes that difference discussable.
The axes
| Axis | What it describes | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Motion | The direction the mechanism works in — linear, rotary, press, flip | Live |
| Agency | Whether you steer the movement throughout, release it and watch, or trigger it once | Live |
| Breakaway force | How hard the mechanism holds before it yields | Live |
| Event sharpness | The impulse at the end of the movement — crisp, damped, or continuous | Live |
| Sound | Silent, low, or audible — and the character of the sound, not only its volume | Live |
| Context | Where the object can actually be used: solo, social, mobile, open | Live |
| Travel | How far the moving part moves, and whether that distance reads as long or short in the hand | Defined, not instrumented |
| Loop | Whether the interaction is a single event or a repeating cycle, and how it resets | Defined, not instrumented |
| Rhythm / density | Events per unit time under normal use — how busy the object is | Defined, not instrumented |
| Feedback location | Where in the hand the event is felt — thumb, fingertips, whole palm, through the wrist | Defined, not instrumented |
| Physical fit | Mass, size, and geometry against a specific hand and a specific pocket | Defined, not instrumented |
Where it is used
- Find Your Feel — six of the eleven axes, phrased for someone with no vocabulary yet.
- Mechanism Notes — how each family produces its position on these axes.
- Object Files — individual objects read against the map.
- Haptic Lab — the measurement work that turns qualitative axes into instrumented ones.
What this is not
Not a rating system. No axis has a good end and a bad end — a firm breakaway is not better than a soft one, it is a different thing that different people want. Nothing here produces a score, and no object is ranked against another.
Gap: five axes are defined but not instrumented — travel, loop, rhythm/density, feedback location, and physical fit have no measurement method and no published data behind them. They appear here as part of the working taxonomy, not as verified findings.
The map will be wrong in places. That is expected of a first taxonomy, and the useful response is correction rather than confidence — if an axis fails to describe something you can feel, say so.