Interdisciplinary Insights for Digital Touch Communication

In this chapter, we make a case for the significance of touch for communication and suggest that developments in sensory digital technologies are bringing touch to the fore in ways that move digital communication beyond ‘ways of seeing’ to include new ‘ways of feeling’. We argue that this shift requires us to take new measure of digitally mediated touch, or ‘digital touch’, as a communicational resource, what it is and can be, how it is designed and imagined, and its communicative potentials and limitations. We situate digital touch communication in relation to a technological awakening to a broader social revaluing of people’s sensorial experience. We introduce and reflect on the socially orientated stance to digital touch we take in this book, and the InTouch project more generally. The chapter provides an overview of the book which also serves to introduce the key themes that it explores, that is the research and technological terrain of digital touch, social norms of touch, presence and connection, sociotechnical imaginaries of digital touch, and the ethics of touch. Finally, we introduce six InTouch case studies which examine digital touch across different contexts, perspectives and participants. We draw illustrative examples from these (alongside extensive engagement with the research literature) in order to enliven and consolidate the book’s exploration of the sociality of digital touch communication across different contexts.

This chapter introduces and reflects on the multimodal, sensory and interdisciplinary methodological stance of this book, and the InTouch project more broadly. We introduce our main framework, which combines multimodality and sensory ethnography. We outline the collaborations and interdisciplinary dialogues that we have engaged with to explore digital touch, and argue that this approach brings different aspects of touch to the fore in ways that are productive for research and design. Finally, the different ways in which we use prototyping to gain access to, and to generate, digital touch experiences and imaginations for the purposes of research is outlined.

This chapter provides a descriptive map of digitally mediated touch communication. Whilst acknowledging our everyday interaction with touch screens, our focus is on emergent and semi-speculative touch technologies that want us to be able to touch and feel objects in new ways: from tangibles, wearables, haptics for virtual reality, through to the tactile internet of skin. It gives an overview of current state-of-the-art digital touch technologies, that enable new forms of touch communication in various contexts, such as work, leisure, learning, personal and social relationships and health and well-being. The chapter assess the scope, extent and findings of user studies to date, and identifies emerging issues around the social aspects of digital touch communication, that might involve human-object, human-human, human to robot or robot to human touch. In so doing, this map documents the resources for touch, the touch interactions supported and the kinds of touch communication practices that are being designed and identifies the social potentials and constraints of touch that are taken up by the designers of ‘digital touch’.

This chapter discusses social norms with attention to their significance for researching and designing digital touch communication in a global world, notably gendered and cultural touch norms. It explores how social and cultural norms shape the ways that people (and machines) touch. Touch norms are shaped, regulated and enforced through social, economic, familial and legal mechanisms, they organise our experiences and expectations. Understanding of the touch norms that people, including digital touch researchers and designers, bring to their interactions with others provides a route into understanding the sociality that shapes digital touch. We discuss the significance of these given the expectations of the user, their touch repertoires, and the social cultural role that norms play in the take up and use of mediated digital touch communication devices and systems and environments. The chapter concludes that reflexive engagement with touch norms can provide insights and inspiration for thinking about, researching and designing digital touch communication, and help to address how cultural and gendered norms of touch might be engaged with, to constrain and re-produce or open-up the meaning potentials of digital touch.

Technologies are intrinsically linked to the ways in which physical, temporal and emotional distances are thought of and managed. Likewise, social relations and communication technologies mutually shape each other as they are developed and maintained. This chapter explores the social connections that digital touch technologies are beginning to shape, with a focus on the related experiences of presence and absence through mediated touch and the questions this raises for the design space of interpersonal relationships, that is, the mediation of touch between people. We first consider how these concepts have been defined and addressed in the literature on communication technologies in general, and touch technologies in particular. We then use three extended examples from InTouch case studies to explore and reflect on these concepts. We consider how touch technologies might challenge us to think about the interaction between human and machine. We close with a consideration of design implications and possibilities for future research.

This Chapter explores the potential of the concept of sociotechnical imaginaries for digital touch communication research and design. It defines the social imaginary and discusses how it works to produce and animate shared systems of meaning and belonging that guide and organize the world, in its histories as well as performed visions of desirable futures through advances in science and technology and imagined technological possibilities. The chapter explores the ways in which this concept can be employed as both a design resource, and as a methodological resource. We argue that as new digital touch technologies enter the communicational landscape the setting for interpersonal sociability is/will be reworked. We explore and make legible emerging sociotechnical imaginaries of digital touch, asking how might touch practices be changed through the uses of technology, and how might this shape communication. In particular, the chapter explores the core themes of the body, time, and place in relation to participants’ sociotechnical imaginations of digital touch. Turning our attention to the sociotechnical imaginary as a methodological resource, we describe our use of a range of creative, making and bodily touch-based methods to access participants’ sociotechnical imaginaries of digital touch and to both explore and re-orientate to the past, present and futures of digital touch communication.

This chapter closes the book with a note on thematic directions, in response to the speculative and emergent character of digital touch communication, signalling our desire and need to keep the conversation open. We point to the significance of a social take on digital touch, particularly with reference to the types of questions this perspective raises and the way it positions technology in relation to people and society more generally. We draw attention to the research insights on digital touch communication discussed throughout the book that may inform design. Finally, we comment on the theoretical and methodological routes that we have taken to research digital touch communication, and draw on the ideas and research presented in this book to sketch an emergent research and design framework for digital touch communication.