Publications

Jewitt, C., Barker, N., and Golmohammadi, L. (2023) Feeling our way: methodological explorations on researching touch through uncertainty. International Journal of Social Research Methodology.

Van der Vlugt, M., Jewitt, C., and Huber, F. (2023, forthcoming) Thresholds of Touch. Journal of Embodied Research.

Barker, N., and Jewitt, C. (2023) Sensory explorations of digital touch: tactile apprenticeship with new industrial robots. In Vannini, P. (Ed.) Routledge Handbook of Sensory Ethnography. Routledge: London.

Jewitt, C., Price, S., Atkinson, D., and Golmohammadi, L. (2022) Editorial. Special issue: Touch Matters, Multimodality & Society, 2 (3).

Golmohammadi, L. (2022) The Catalogue of Touch. Special issue: Touch Matters, Multimodality & Society, 2 (3).

Jewitt, C., Barker, N., and Steimle, J. (2022) Interactive skin through a social-sensory speculative lens. The Senses & Society, online first.

Samuelsson, R., Price, S., and Jewitt, C. (2022) How young children’s play is shaped through common iPad applications: a study of 2 and 4–5 year-olds. Learning, Media and Technology.

(2022) ‘Considering social implications of new touch technologies‘. Results in brief, CORDIS  European Commission.

Jewitt, C., Price, S., Steimle, J., Huisman, G., Golmohammadi, L., Pourjafarian, N., Frier, W., Howard, T., Ipakchian Askari, S., Ornati, M., Paneels, S. and Weda, J. (2022) A provocative call to engage with social and sensory aspects of touch. Special issue: Touch Matters, Multimodality & Society, 2 (3).

Leder Mackley, K., and Jewitt, C. (2022) Sociotechnical imaginaries of remote personal touch before and during COVID-19: An analysis of UK newspapers, New Media & Society.

Price, S., Bianchi-Berthouze, N., Jewitt, C., & Steimle, J. (2022) Introduction to the Special Issue on Digital Touch: Reshaping Interpersonal Communicative Capacity and Touch Practices. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, 29 (3). 

Price, S., Berthouze, N., Jewitt, C., Yiannoutsou, N., Fotopoulou, A., Dajic, S., Brudy, F. (2022) The making of meaning through dyadic haptic affective touch. ACM Transactions on Computer – Human Interaction, 29 (3).

Jewitt, C., Mitchell, V., Wilson, G.T., Golmohammadi, L., Atkinson, D., Leder Mackley, K., and S. Price (2022) Supporting Novice Designers’ Design of Digital Touch. International Journal of Technology and Design Education.

Jewitt, C., Barker, N. and Golmohammadi, L. (2022) Creative Probes, Proxy Feelers, and Speculations on Interactive Skin. Multimodal Technologies & Interaction, 6 (4), pp.22-42.

Barker, N. and Jewitt C. (2021) Future touch in industry: Exploring sociotechnical imaginaries of tactile (tele)robots. Futures

Jewitt C., Van der Vlugt M. and F. Hübner (2021) Sensoria: An exploratory interdisciplinary framework for researching multimodal & sensory experiences. Methodological Innovations

Jewitt C., Price S., Steimle J., Huisman G., Golmohammadi L., Pourjafarian N., Frier W., Howard T., Ipakchian Askar S., Ornati M., Panëels S. and J. Weda (2021). Manifesto for Digital Social Touch in Crisis. Frontiers.

Samuelsson R., Price S. and C. Jewitt (2021) How pedagogical relations in early years settings are reconfigured by interactive touchscreens. British Journal of Educational Technology 

Barker, N. and C. Jewitt (2021) Filtering Touch: An Ethnography of Dirt, Danger, and Industrial Robots. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography

Price S., Jewitt C., Chubinidze D., Barker N. and N. Yiannoutsou (2021) Taking an Extended Embodied Perspective of Touch: Connection-Disconnection in iVR. Virtual Reality

Jewitt C., Chubinidze D., Price S., Yiannoutsou N. and N. Barker (2021) Making sense of digitally remediated touch in virtual reality experiences. Discourse, Context & Media

Price, S., Jewitt, C. & Yiannoutsou, N. (2021) Conceptualising touch in VR. Virtual Reality

Leder Mackley, K., Jewitt, C. and Price, S. (2020) The Remediating Effects of Bio-Sensing in the Context of Parental Touch Practice. Information, Communication & Society.

Jewitt, C., Leder Mackley, K. and Price, S. (2021) Digitally Mediated Parent-Baby Touch and the Formation of Subjectivities. Visual Communication.

Mitchell, V., Thomas Wilson, G.T., Leder Mackley, K., Jewitt, C., Golmohammadi, L., Atkinson, D. & Price, S. (2020) Digital Touch: Towards a Novel User-Experience Design Pedagogy. Design and Technology Education: an International Journal.

Barker, N., Jewitt, C. and Price, S. (2020) Becoming in Touch with Industrial Robots through Ethnography, HRI ’20: Companion of the 2020 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction, March 2020

Jewitt, C., Leder Mackley, K. & Price, S. (2020) Digital touch for Remote Personal Communication: an Emergent Sociotechnical Imaginary. New Media and Society. DOI:10.1007/978-3-030-24564-1

Jewitt, C., Price, S., Leder Mackley, K., Yiannoutsou, N., Atkinson, D. (2020) Interdisciplinary Insights for Digital Touch Communication, Springer Nature.

Golmohammadi, L. (2020) Researching loneliness in a pandemic: touch and touch-technologies along with its methodological challenges. International Journal of Social Research Methodology blog.

Mitchell, V., Wilson, G. T., Leder Mackley, K., Jewitt, C., Golmohammadi, L., Atkinson, D., Price, S. (2019) Digital Touch Experiences: Educating the Designers. Proceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems extended abstracts. Glasgow, Scotland UK — May 04 – 09, 2019.

Jewitt, C. and Price, S. (2019) Family Touch Practices and Learning Experiences in the Museum, The Senses and Society Journal.

Jewitt, C., Leder Mackley, K., Atkinson, D. and Price, S. (2019) Rapid Prototyping as a Method for Social Science: Researching Digital Touch. In L. Pauwels and D. Mannay (eds.) Sage Handbook of Visual Research Methods, 2nd ed.

Jewitt, C. and Leder Mackley, K. (2018) Methodological Dialogues across Multimodality and Sensory Ethnography: Digital Touch Communication, Qualitative Research, Online First: https://doi.org/10.1177/1468794118796992.

Price, S., Leder Mackley, K., Jewitt, C., Huisman, G., Petreca, B., Berthouze, N., Prattichizzo, D., and Hayward, V. (2018) Reshaping Touch Communication: an Interdisciplinary Research Agenda, CHI EA ‘18 Extended Abstracts of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, W17.

Invisible Flock with IN-TOUCH (2018), Remote Contact Exhibition Booklet.

Jewitt, C. (2017) A Multimodal Perspective on Touch, Communication and Learning. In F. Serafini, E. Gee (eds.), Remixing Multiliteracies: Theory and Practice from New London to New Times. New York: Teachers College Press.

Jewitt, C. (2017) Towards a Multimodal Social Semiotic Agenda for Touch. In S. Zhao, E. Djonov, A. Bjorkvall and M. Boerils (eds.) Advancing Multimodal and Critical Discourse Studies: Interdisciplinary Research. Routledge: London, 79-93.

Media Publications

Golmohammadi, L. 2021. Lunch Hour Lectures: Loneliness, Touch and Digital Touch Technologies [Webinar]. [Online]. UCL Minds Lunch Hour Lectures.

Haptic Technology Opens the Door for Mediated Touch,  interview for HaptX, 22/10/2020

How Digital Touch Can Help People Connect, film produced by UCL Institute of Education, 15/05/2019

Communicating by Touch: the Final Frontier?, film produced by UCL Institute of Education, 18/10/2018

Can Technology Help Dementia Patients? , The Guardian Podcast ‘Chips with Everything’, 08/06/2018

Research Exhibition

Remote Contact, part of UCL Festival of Culture, Bloomsbury Gallery, London, 04/06/2019 – 09/06/2019.

Festivals

Connecting, Communicating, Feeling Through Digital Touch (stall and talk), as part of the It’s All Academic Festival,  UCL Main Campus, 05/10/2019

Methodological Resources

Designing Digital Touch Toolkit
The Designing Digital Touch Toolkit was developed through research on the process of designing digitally mediated touch, with attention to the social and sensory aspects of design. It aims to provoke and support designers to put touch at the centre of their design research, thinking and prototyping. It was produced in collaboration with Loughborough University and you can find out more about the toolkit development here.

Workshops

2021

Touch Tools: Bringing Social-Sensorial Tools into Digital Touch Design. Part of Worldhaptics 2021. 05/07/2021.

2020

Possibilities for digitally mediated touch: soundboarding perspectives between social science and engineering. Presentation given as part of – Robotics and the Synthetic Environment Workshop, Fair-Space Hub and Thales Alenia Space, 25/09/2020.

Designing Digital Touch: Social and Sensory Aspects and Challenges. As part of Eurohaptics 2020 in Leiden, Netherlands. 06/09/2020.

Thresholds of Touch: A Short Performative Experiment in Tactile Exploration, performance and workshop organised by IN-TOUCH and collaborators, London, 23/01/2020 – 24/01/2020.

2019

‘Mapping Loneliness and Touch‘ – workshop at the Wellcome Collection, as part of the Open Platform series, 27/11/19

Touch-in’ the virtual: Exploring digital touch communication in VR, workshop run by the IN-TOUCH team and Dr Gijs Huisman, London, 03/06/2019

2018

Knowing, sensing, ‘feeling’ through video – talk and workshop at the Volkskundemuseum, Vienna, as part of the ‘Stadt-Land-Kind’ project (Akademie der Bildenden Kuenste, Vienna), 18/10/18

Reshaping Touch Communication: An Interdisciplinary Research Agenda, CHI’18, Montréal, Canada, 21/04/2018: This one-day workshop brought together an interdisciplinary group of researchers and designers to examine new forms of touch communication enabled by digital touch technologies, address critical questions and challenges for HCI, reshape future research agendas, and build a cross disciplinary community that fosters subsequent collaboration.

See our co-organiser Gijs Huisman’s Thinking Piece for his post-workshop reflections.

Conference presentations and seminars

2021

• The Designing Digital Touch (DDT) Toolkit: Social-Sensorial Prompts, IEEE World Haptics Conference 2021, Touch Tools, 5 July 2021.
• A Manifesto of Digital Social Touch in Crisis: The Need for ‘Touchy Tools’, IEEE World Haptics Conference 2021, Touch Tools, 5 July 2021.
• We all need a hug, right? UK newspapers discourses of touch and the digital during COVID-19, Uncommon Senses III, 6 May 2021.
• InTouch: Digital Touch Communication, part of University of Leeds’ Multimodality Talks Series, 30 April 2021
• Adaptation in sensory and material methods in Covid-19 times, NCRM webinar on Methods, 28 January 2021.

2020

• Researching touch during a pandemic. Intellectual Life, University College London, 26/11/2020.
• The shifting frontiers of touching manual labour: a review of the potential impacts of novel industrial robots on touch. Intellectual Life, University College London, 13/01/2020

2019 

• Growing new bodies and sensory experiences (in conversation with Tamar Makin), Encounters on the shop Floor Event, Victoria and Albert Museum Research Institute VARI, 26/06/2019.
• IN-TOUCH: Digital touch communication at Approaches to Multimodal Digital Environments: from theories to practices (A-MODE), Keynote, University of “Tor Vergata”, Rome, 21/06/2019.
• Emerging Sociotechnical Imaginaries of Digital Touch for Remote Personal Communication, Key note, Approaches to Digital Discourse Analysis 2, ADDA2,
  University of Turku Communications, Turku, Finland, 23/05/2019.
• Digital Touch Experiences: Educating the Designers, CHI’19, Glasgow, Scotland, 04/05/2019 – 09/05/2019.
• Methodological Dialogues across multimodality and multisensory approaches, Keynote, BAAL – Reading beyond words: Approaches to multimodality in the media, Queen Mary University, London, 12/04/2019.
• Researching Digital Touch, presentation at symposium on ‘Material engagement, hand-making, and well-being’, Kebble College, Oxford University, Oxford, 01/04/2019.
• Loneliness and Digital Touch Communication, Intellectual Life, UCL Knowledge Lab, London, 28/03/2019.
• Reimagining Touch, guest lecture, Hum Lab, Umea University Sweden, Department of Creative Studies & Hum Lab, 20/03/2019 – 22/03/2019.
• Biometrics: The Transformation of the Human Condition, Roundtable discussion, THECUBE and FACT as part of “Cognitive Sensations seminar series”, 19/03/2019.
• InTouch: Digital Touch Communication, SCHILab (Sussex Computer Human Interaction Lab), University of Sussex, 13/03/2019.
• IN-TOUCH: digital touch communication, MA User Experience Design, Loughborough University, Loughborough, 12/03/2019.
• Researching Touch Futures, Keynote, International Food Science and Technology (IFST) Sensory Science Group event: Changing Perspectives in Sensory Science – Past, Present, and Future, University of Reading, Reading, 07/03/2019.
• Designing Digital Touch Toolkit, Intellectual Life, UCL Knowledge Lab, London, 07/03/19.
• IN-TOUCH: digital touch communication, BA Industrial Design and Technology, Loughborough University, Loughborough, 06/02/2019.
• The Association of Fashion and Textile Courses (FTC) Futurescan 4: Valuing Practice, University of Bolton, Bolton, 24/01/2019.
• Imaginations of digital touch: continuities and change, MeCCSA 2019, University of Stirling, Scotland, 10/01/19.

2018

• IN-TOUCH group presentation at UCL Plasticity Lab (Tamar Makin), Queen Anne’s SQ London, 18/12/2018.
• Multimodal and multisensorial approaches to materiality ‘value’ as a material, social and economic infrastructure symposium’, The Barlett, UCL, London, 13/11/2018.
• Futures of Digital Touch Make Digital Right (Public lecture series), Bozar centre (artistic and cultural venue in Brussels and Belgium), Invited by Consigliere culturale – Ambasciata d’Italia, Brussels, 23/09/2018.
• Making Sense of Baby: Parenting, technology and the politics of touch, Symposium: The politics of Sensation, International Sociological Association, Toronto, Canada, 17/07/2018.
• Researching Digitally Mediated Touch Communication, Uncommon Senses II, Sensory Lab, Concordia University, Montréal, Canada, 4/05/2018.
• Illuminating the Social and Sensory in Digital Touch Communication, Reshaping Touch Communication: An Interdisciplinary Research Agenda, CHI’18, Montréal, Canada, 21/04/2018.
• Personal Remote Touch Communication (Keynote), Hold me Now. Feel and Touch in an Unreal World, The Studium Generale Rietveld Academie, Amsterdam, 22/03/2018.
• Digital Touch Communication, Communication and Media Research Institute, Westminster University, London, 15/03/2018.
• Multimodality and Digital Touch, University of East Anglia, Norwich 21/02/2018.
• Touch for Garment Making: Interfaces, Emotions, Humans and Things. CELebration, the Connected Everyday Lab, TU Delft, the Netherlands, 05/02/2018.

2017

• Doing Multimodal Data – Doing Multimodal Analysis: Touch as a Case Study, Discourse Seminar at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Trondheim, 30/11/2017 to 1/12/2017.
• Researching and Re-imagining Digital Touch, Faculty of Visual Communication, Royal College of Art, London, 9/11/2017.
• Digital Research Methods for Use in Health Contexts, Great Ormond Street Hospital, 9/10/2017.
• Innovating Digital Methods, Ego-Media ERC Project seminar, Digital Humanities, Kings college, London, 26/04/17.
• Digital Lives: New ways of Working and Living, EPSRC Balance Network interdisciplinary workshop, Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, 10/01/2017.

2016

• In-Touch: Feeling our Way (Keynote), 8^th International Conference on Multimodality, University of Cape Town, South Africa, 07/12/2016.
• Boundary Crossing Methods: Arts and Social Sciences, LETStudio Seminar, Gothenburg, 27/10/2016.