Ran Zhou's 80% seminar - Designing Expressive Robotic Touch: Methods, Tools, and Meaning-Making with Otherness

Welcome to Ran Zhou’s 80% seminar

Time: Sep 30th, 3-5 PM

Room: 4618Flexi Studio

Zoom: https://kth-se.zoom.us/j/68326117739

Discussant: Bill Gaver (Northumbria University)

Title: Designing Expressive Robotic Touch: Methods, Tools, and Meaning-Making with Otherness

Abstract: Touch, sensed through the skin, fundamentally shapes our engagement with surroundings, artifacts, and other beings. Recent scientific investigations have deepened our understanding of how humans perceive and interpret touch, while advances in haptic technologies continue to expand what robotic touch can achieve, demonstrating its potential across critical application domains such as healthcare, accessibility, teleoperation, and entertainment. Yet, the integration of robotic touch into everyday experiences is still at an early stage, leaving much of touch’s expressive potential for communication, emotional attunement, and aesthetic appreciation underexplored. Designing expressive robotic touch to unlock this potential remains an open challenge.

Coming from a design perspective, I view touch as a design material that can be crafted, shaped, and composed. Taking this stance, I envision a future in which robotic touch is expressive and evocative, seamlessly woven into daily life, and capable of engaging the human body in meaningful and respectful ways. My research advances this vision through iterative design inquiries spanning three intertwined strands: investigating how designers approach and prototype expressive robotic touch; developing open-source haptic toolkits that empower designers and support design exploration; and understanding how designers make meaning of touch through designing with robotic systems.

This dissertation is grounded in four design research projects spanning the elicitation of emotional touch, the design of robotic touch outside of the lab, collaborative on-body touch crafting, and the prototyping of soft electrohydraulic actuators for expressive haptics. These projects progressively broaden the design space of expressive robotic touch while contributing new design methods, prototyping tools, and touch designs. Long-term reflection across this body of work further articulates robotic touch’s “otherness” as a design quality that fosters alternative interpretations and creative imagination, making touch more acceptable, registerable, and expressive.