Title: Soft Touch Workshop
(Summer 2022)

Teaching: 4-day online workshop on textile interfaces

“Soft Touch” workshop explored the creation of soft interfaces for human computing interaction. The development of IoT technologies is in need of better tangible interfaces, where the experience of interaction can include the whole body and senses. Textiles in this field present themselves as exciting materials with special haptic characteristics that can trigger movements, gestures, and feelings that affect the way humans approach digital interfaces. Frame on Material Driven Design methodologies, this workshop invites the students to explore the physical world of soft materials, textures, and shapes. They were able to create their own soft interfaces with a focus on haptics, aiming to communicate in an interactive way with a digital data visualization code in Processing.

The teaching process included theoretical contents regarding smart textiles, haptics, and material-driven design for HCI, as well as technical knowledge about basic circuits and Processing. The design process started with personal questions on how these new interfaces could enable new ways of interaction in specific contexts, for example, a visually impaired visitor to a museum. The outcomes are both physical and digital and expect to create discussion on how we are relating to digital interfaces and how there is much to explore yet.

Part of DigitalFUTURES organized by Tongji University - a yearly series of online events, including workshops, doctoral consortium, conference, awards, and exhibitions

︎ Workshop website

︎︎︎ In collaboration with Sofia Guridi