Touchability Graphic
Overview
The “Touch Meme” has been floating around the internet for a while, and it’s difficult - if not impossible - to find its origin. Over time the graphic has become degraded with JPEG artifacts.
However, it’s proven a useful tool within the autism community for conveying where we’re comfortable being touched and by who.
In order for people to have a nice clean starting point, I’ve recreated the graphic, with a few changes, and made it available in vector and rasterized formats. I’ve also created a version of the person pre-divided into sections so that you only need to use a “Paint Bucket” tool to fill in the parts with the colors appropriate for you.
Example
We each have very specific feelings about what parts of our body we’re ok with being touched by different groups of people. For example, I don’t want strangers touching me at all but because our society demands it, I’m “Ehh” about shaking hands with acquaintances, and have learned to deal with the fact that touchy people may touch my arms. I’m fine with lovers touching my groin, but it’s a “hell no” from everyone else.
Think about how you feel about each of these groups touching various parts of your body, and fill in the various body parts to represent how you feel about it.
Here’s a quick side-by-side of the blank template, and how I chose to fill it out.
Templates
Blank template images
Download any of these to modify or fill in as you see fit. Note that the font used is “Marker Felt”
- JPEG Format ← If you’re not sure, download this one.
- SVG Format
- Affinity Designer Format
Pre-divided little person
So that you can easily fill it the appropriate sections with the Paint Bucket tool. The colors are intended to be replaced with the ones that are appropriate for you. Fill them in then, copy-paste the colored person into the larger template so that folks can see what the colors mean and what group of people they apply to.
