Author bio: Brendon Bussy is a special needs teacher, artist, maker and retired mandolin player. At the Dominican School for Deaf Children in Wittebome, Cape Town he teaches design, visual arts and performance. His interests include language (he is proficient in South African Sign Language) and multi-modal teaching approaches such as role playing. http://brendonbussy.wordpress.com/ Sight… Continue reading Reflections on sight, sound and touch – a guest post by special needs teacher Brendon Bussy
Thinking Pieces
Reflections on ‘Hold Me Now: Feel and Touch in an Unreal World’
This blog post reports and reflects on the ‘Hold Me Now: Feel and Touch in an Unreal World’ conference (21-24 March 2018), with a focus on the days IN-TOUCH attended (days two, three and four). The conference was a productive and thought-provoking experience for the IN-TOUCH project. It was a between the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and… Continue reading Reflections on ‘Hold Me Now: Feel and Touch in an Unreal World’
What does touch sound like?
At IN-TOUCH we like to think about touch in different ways and recently we asked ourselves the question ‘What does touch sound like?’ When you think about touch, you probably think of tactile sensations, the feeling of your body coming into contact with something. Yet much of our sensory experience comes about through a combination… Continue reading What does touch sound like?
Reflecting on Remote Personal Communication, by Nicola Josephine Flüchter
In October/November 2017, IN-TOUCH organised a number of rapid prototyping workshops to explore with interdisciplinary groups of postgraduate students the possibilities of personal touch communication at a distance. As part of these workshops, we introduced students to the Kissenger prototype, a remote kissing machine designed by Emma Zhang and Prof. Adrian Cheok at the Imagineering… Continue reading Reflecting on Remote Personal Communication, by Nicola Josephine Flüchter
CFP – CHI 2018 workshop ‘Reshaping Touch Communication: An Interdisciplinary Research Agenda’
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’
IN-TOUCH Q&A with David Parisi
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
Touch awareness: its role for IN-TOUCH
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
Visual touch or sensing with the eyes
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
Machine touch?
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?
Book review: Losing 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
IN-TOUCH: DIGITAL TOUCH COMMUNICATION 