Designing a library of Affective Touches

Touch can convey comfort and love, but also warning and fear. It's universal, but also highly subjective to cultural norms. What does a touch mean here in Sweden? Does it mean the same in Brazil? Remove one of the humans, and we get to a more complex question. That's the exploration we do during the workshop.

During the session, we invite participants to co-create soft robotics touch patterns, thinking about the texture, the placement on the body, the rhythm, and the strength. Each group of participants create their own touches, using inflatable pads, the groups decide how they want the pad to be, maybe a soft layer of fabric, or nails, to create an alarming touch. After, we save those touches into a touch library, created for this project, that allows other users to access and test this collection of touches that we are co-creating together.

This workshop is for people who want to think about ways that technology can live close to the human body. It's not a tech session, we spend more time doing things with our hands than interacting with computers.