Yoav Luft 50% seminar

Title: Somatic Programming of Digital Touch

Discussant: Prof. Martin Jonsson, Södertörns Högskola

Abstract:
Digital touch is a growing and highly challenging research area, incorporating knowledge from multiple disciplines such as design, human-computer interaction, haptics, and robotics.
One aspect of designing digital touch is programming the logic by which data--from sensors or other sources-- is translated to actuation.
Due to how our sense of touch is discrete and highly contextual, distributed on all over our body and contains multiple sensing channels such as warmth, pressure, friction, kinaesthetic, and awareness to our internal sensations, and due to how programming being a specialised activity, programming digital touch presents new challenges for designers and engineers.
In this PhD project, I examine what kind of problems researchers who design for digital touch encounter while programming; and using RtD I explore ways to engage with programming in ways inspired from working more traditional materials.
I present my preliminary results: that programming digital touch is inherently a somatic activity, that the socio-technical aspects of programming digital touch--e.g. working in multidisciplinary teams--must be addressed by future designs, and how there are opportunities to develop practices, methods and 'ceremonies' to support programming digital touch.