Towards Robot and Technologies that Touch Well – Shaping an Experience-driven Design Paradigm

摘要

Inter-human touch plays a vital role in social communication and bonding, maintaining physical and emotional well-being. Advances in robotics, alongside novel haptic technologies such as shape-changing interfaces, are leading to increasing opportunities for technologies to touch humans in different settings. This includes future touch-based interaction design to support remote and robot care, physical and mental well-being, social bonding, and novel sensory experience for the metaverse, entertainment and everyday life. However, the key to unlock these potentials depends on whether the technology can touch well, i.e. whether the felt quality, or experiential affordance matches the expectation for the intended use cases. In these applications, the touch function and its experiential affordances are two sides of the same coin and need to be investigated simultaneously. Currently we identify two main challenges. First, human touch is a highly complex matter to study and evaluate, with a wide range of variables impacting its experiential qualities, while authoring touch is laborious and demands cross-disciplinary expertise and skills. Second, these investigations are often conducted separately in different disciplines. In responding to this design issue, this one-day workshop aims to bring together scholars, designers and practitioners from diverse disciplines in order to initiate an experience-driven design paradigm, where the felt (somaesthetic) qualities, technical realisation, and ethical dimensions can be studied more holistically. Through a mixture of activities including presentations, hands-on interactions with haptic technologies samples, and group discussions, this workshop also aims to discuss principles, terminologies, methodologies, tools, opportunities, and challenges for such an experience-driven design paradigm, one that enables richer and more fine-grained technologies of touch.