Guest post, by Marc Teyssier (@marcteyssier) https://youtu.be/OuEhqHvE1qU As a designer and researcher, I am constantly obsessed with how to shape the future of interfaces and technologies. Until recently, this was easy for me to imagine. Similar to many of us, my creativity for the future was fuelled with visions proposed by science-fiction books and movies… Continue reading What Anthropomorphic Design can do for Digital Touch
Thinking Pieces
Touching Lyrics
By Dimitri Chubinidze (@DChubini) with the InTouch team. At the start of spring, and after a long winter, the human sensorium enters a new cycle of perception. This ‘tuning’ of sensual experiences and its rhythmic orchestration are perfectly represented in music culture. In this blog post I pick up from our festive 2020 ‘Touched by… Continue reading Touching Lyrics
Lost in delivery. Touch, and fashion’s inconsistent communication to the visually impaired
Guest post, by Michela Ornati (@michela.ornati) About a year into my new PhD program at the Università della Svizzera italiana, Switzerland, I began losing my eyesight. I have been myopic since adolescence, so not seeing well has always been the norm for me. But this was different. The decline was marked, and what was worse,… Continue reading Lost in delivery. Touch, and fashion’s inconsistent communication to the visually impaired
Researching Digital Touch During and After a Pandemic
Guest post, by Ned Barker (@nedbarker10) with the InTouch team. Methodological innovation is at the core of the InTouch project. Our engagement with digitally mediated touch builds on a ‘socially orientated’ stance to touch. Prior to the pandemic, our research activities involved observing, participating in, experimenting with, and disrupting touch through in-situ methods developed by… Continue reading Researching Digital Touch During and After a Pandemic
Touched by Music: a Christmas Playlist with a Tactile Spin
By In-Touch Music is a part of our everyday lives: many song lyrics both ‘touch’ us and tell stories of our tactile relationships with one another. The interdisciplinary InTouch Project at UCL explores the social implications of digital technology for touch communication. As a fun side-project the team has compiled a Touch Playlist – and… Continue reading Touched by Music: a Christmas Playlist with a Tactile Spin
Digital Touch: An Online Exhibition Curated by Carlos Pinto and Georgia Perkins
Guest post, by Georgia Perkins (@_GeorgiaPerkins) This guest ‘thinking piece’ illustrates the aim of the online exhibition Digital Touch, to surpass narrow notions and definitions of touch to highlight possibilities of different kinds of intimacy, care and contact which can be felt through the screen. With the demand for social distancing and self-isolation in response… Continue reading Digital Touch: An Online Exhibition Curated by Carlos Pinto and Georgia Perkins
Fashioning Digital Touch
New digital processes are changing how garments are designed and developed. From wearable electronics to motion capture, to crafting a pattern on a virtual mannequin, what does rapid digitisation in fashion education and industry mean for touch? Has the role of touch and tactile material engagement in the garment design development process been fully understood yet? How does one go about studying touch practices in the contemporary fashion studio? In this episode, Lili Golmohammadi speaks to UAL lecturer, researcher, and fellow IN-TOUCH PhD candidate Douglas Atkinson about how he came to frame his study, and the ethnographic approaches he employed to understand how fashion students and tutor-practitioners use touch. Now in the final stages of the PhD, Douglas reflects on how digital touch technologies might best support fashion designers’ touch practices in the future.
What the eye can’t see: closer observation with touch and drawing in anatomy education
Guest post, by Leonard Shapiro B.Soc.Sc., B.A. Fine Art (Hons.), Department of Human Biology, University of Cape Town, South Africa. (www.lateralleap.co.za, Twitter: @leonard_shapiro, Instagram: @leonard_shapiro) In the post, Leonard Shapiro describes how he came to develop an observation method based on touch and drawing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-sJAioNbAis&t=2s Fig. 1: Anatomy observation exercise using touch and drawing in… Continue reading What the eye can’t see: closer observation with touch and drawing in anatomy education
NeoTouch: a speculative brain-computer-interface technology
Guest post, by Christine Wurth (www.christinewurth.com / @christinewurth) NeoTouch is a Speculative Design project envisioning the future of haptic technology. It takes the form of a communication device based on a brain-computer-interface which allows the wearer to experience touch at a distance. This post discusses the project’s design methods used to interrogate the ethical and… Continue reading NeoTouch: a speculative brain-computer-interface technology
Soft, Simple, Sens-ational: creating body-powered prostheses with feeling
Guest post, by Helge Wurdemann, Associate Professor of Robotics, UCL Mechanical Engineering [helge-wurdemann.com, softhaptics.website, @H_Wurdemann, YouTube] As a roboticist, one of my research interests covers the creation of interfaces that allow humans to interact with something or somebody through receiving tactile stimuli – these systems are called haptic feedback interfaces. One prominent example includes the… Continue reading Soft, Simple, Sens-ational: creating body-powered prostheses with feeling
IN-TOUCH: DIGITAL TOUCH COMMUNICATION 