Enhancing the social contributions of technology through touch
The UCL Knowledge Lab explores the potential of integrating touch into digital design and informs the development of new design tools and industry guidelines.
Grand Challenge: Transformative Technology
Social touch is a deeply human part of communication and development, and there is growing interest in how it relates to education, wellbeing, and even technology design.
Inspired by the impact of lockdown on human interaction, and the social isolation it brought, a UCL Knowledge Lab team based at the Department of Culture, Communication and Media, UCL Institute of Education, has led groundbreaking work to explore the potential of integrating touch into digital design. Going beyond the familiar use of vibration in gaming, it has opened the possibilities of ‘digital social touch’, and informed the development of new design tools, and industry guidelines to shape this emerging field, contributing to UCL’s ambition to support society to navigate the potential of transformative technologies.
Understanding the social and sensory aspects of touch
The role of touch in human and social development is widely studied. Touch is central to how we develop, form bonds and relationships, and experience the world around us. But there are widespread concerns that social touch is in crisis. The negative impact of a lack of social touch on communication, relationships and wellbeing and health is well documented. The problematics of inappropriate social touch, abusive social touch, and the ethics of social touch are also widely reported.
The potential of integrating touch into the design of digital technologies is enormous. While engineers and computer scientists focus primarily on technological techniques and the functionality of touch (haptics), UCL Institute of Education researchers have been working to widen the field to focus attention on the social dimensions of touch communication which is vital for responsible, human-centred, ethical design. Professor Carey Jewitt and Professor Sara Price from the UCL Knowledge Lab, supported by the European Research Council, have collaborated with engineers and computer scientists to promote a social and critical focus on the design of digital touch in robotics, haptics and virtual environments.
Designing a digital touch toolkit
A free online toolkit, developed in collaboration with design educators, foregrounds the social and sensory aspects of touch for design. In a series of digital touch design workshops facilitated by Professors Jewitt and Price, designers found the toolkit ‘triggered new sensory ideas’, and ‘helped think through touch experiences users might want in relation to a design’. The toolkit is distributed via leading international haptics sites and has received considerable attention and interest.
Manifesto for social digital touch
A research-led manifesto (over 6,400 views and 1000 downloads since 2021) developed with and for computer scientists and engineers, provided a provocative call to bring the ‘social’ into haptic design, to rethink and reimagine digital social touch through a deeper engagement with the social and sensory aspects of social touch.
The manifesto provided a springboard for the development of Guidelines for Socially Aware Haptic Experience Design. These were developed through a collaborative partnership with industry (Ultraleap) and a network of computer scientists, engineers and designers (2023–2024). International expert evaluators appraised them as “really helpful, nicely concretizing and operationalizing, situating with examples”.
This work has impacted the field in profound and significant ways and introduced the term ‘digital touch’ to newly embed the social and sensory into haptics. A senior engineer/designer described the research “like a magic mirror that lets us see the known [our designs] in a transformed way . . . to add new perspectives”, demonstrating the power of interdisciplinary research to open up new creative and educational possibilities.