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How do design things ‘represent’ touch and produce palpable, visceral affect? This thesis is a speculative and creative proposal, what Daniela Rosner refers to as a “critical fabulation” (2018), for a more- human-aesthetics for design things, using the relational figure of the ‘tactile’ as a material and conceptual mode: as a bodily, phenomenological sense, as potentially affective, and as a quality emanating from more-than-human matter. Design things exist in the physical, natural world, but they are also known and experienced as objects in species-specific semiotic life-worlds or Umwelts. Drawing on Peircean pragmatism and biosemiotics, this thesis argues that the palpable visceral force emerging in aesthetic encounters with design things, “tactile affect”, emerges from the continuous action of signs or semiosis, and that non-human beings and ‘inanimate’ matter are equally involved in this relational becoming. Such a relational aesthetics challenges Cartesian dualisms and has far-reaching implications for design epistemology, ontology and ethics.