Book design for The Haptic Way — A Handbook for Practice

Haptic Architects marked their tenth birthday with the publication of ‘The Haptic Way, a handbook for practice’.

We worked closely with Haptic to develop this book’s content, concept and design.

The content focuses on how the studio practices rather than the projects they make. It is intended as a practical tool — a manual for Hapticians and other young practitioners. We designed and hosted five workshops to help Haptic articulate approaches to business, design methods, workplace, culture and networks. These provided the focus and foundations for the book's five chapters.

Our concept and design for the final form follow the principles of exposed inner workings and tool-like functionality. The exposed spine of the book reveals the coloured thread stitching. This lays workings bare while helping this fully-packed, hand-sized book to open naturally for everyday handling. Its threads also echo the colour coding we employed on page tabs and throughout the book's layouts as chapter wayfinding for readers. Typography remains intentionally matter-of-fact and directory-like while visual hatching, a key element across Haptic's identity, finds more scope for play across chapter dividers, illustrations and diagrams.

Co-Founder Timo Haedrich: “As architects we know a lot about architecture and not that much about business, so this monograph is a means of gathering in one place our thoughts on how we practice rather than the design of our different projects. We keep learning all the time, and by recording these in a manual format, we hope that others will learn with us rather than from us.”

Edited by Emma Keyte
Printed and bound by Bubu
Repro by Wolfau Druck