IN-TOUCH: DIGITAL TOUCH COMMUNICATION
Understanding the social character and societal impact of touch as it is digitally mediated – developing novel theory and methods
The IN-TOUCH team is excited to announce that we are co-organising a CHI 2018 workshop on 'Reshaping Touch Communication: An Interdisciplinary Research Agenda'. The workshop is set to take place on 21st April 2018. More details can be found on our workshop website. Please see our Call for Participation below. We look forward to seeing you… Continue reading CFP – CHI 2018 workshop ‘Reshaping Touch Communication: An Interdisciplinary Research Agenda’
Dr David Parisi is an Associate Professor of Emerging Media in the Department of Communication at the College of Charleston, USA. His research investigates the construction of touch through media technologies, with a particular emphasis on the historical, archaeological and genealogical foundations of contemporary haptic human-computer interfaces. His book Archaeologies of Touch: Interfacing with Haptics… Continue reading IN-TOUCH Q&A with David Parisi
Recent visits and discussions with various technologists, including robotics engineers and computer scientists, have made us think about the question of how the development of touch-related digital technologies might bring about new awareness of ‘touch’: the conscious sensation of touching, and the specificity of those particular sensations. Some robotics engineers develop robots to work in… Continue reading Touch awareness: its role for IN-TOUCH
The notion that it is possible to ‘see with the hands’, as Descartes once put it in Dioptrique (1637, see Paterson 2016), chimes with the popular imagination of the sense of touch as somehow enhanced in people with impaired vision. It is linked to centuries of philosophical debate and scientific research of how blind people… Continue reading Visual touch or sensing with the eyes
IN-TOUCH visited the London Science Museum’s new Robots exhibition this week. The exhibition sets out to understand what it means to be human by exploring the ‘very human obsession to recreate ourselves’. The quest to build ever more complex robots has transformed our understanding of the human body, and today robots are becoming increasingly human, learning… Continue reading Machine touch?
Losing Touch - a Man without his body. Jonathan Cole, 2016, Oxford University Press This book is about understanding the experience of living with the loss of touch – cutaneous touch and movement/position sense (proprioception). ‘Touch Ian, stroke him, or put a heavy weight in his hand and he cannot feel it. For all the… Continue reading Book review: Losing Touch
Smart textiles or e-textiles are ordinary materials with a range of electronics, conductive materials and sensors woven into the fabric, and that respond to movement and/or touch. Smart textiles are materials that have ‘sensing and actuating properties’. This means they can both ‘sense’ and ‘react’ to external factors in the environment, e.g. mechanical, chemical, thermal,… Continue reading What is the role of e-textiles and smart textiles for touch based communication?
