Thammasat University students interested in artificial intelligence, science, media and communications studies, sociology, and related subjects may find it useful to participate in a free 10 July Zoom book launch on digital touch.
The event, on Wednesday, 10 July 2024 at 10:30pm Bangkok time, is presented by University College London, the United Kingdom.
The TU Library collection includes several books about different aspects of digital touch.
According to the event webpage:
Join this event to hear Carey Jewitt and Sara Price discuss their new book on the importance of digital touch in our daily lives and how it will impact our relationships and future way of life.
Digital touch is embedded in many technologies, from wearable devices and gaming hardware to tactile robots and future technologies. What would it be like if we could hug or touch digitally across distance? How might this shape our sense of connection? How might we establish trust or protect our privacy and safety?
Offering a rich account of digital touch, the book introduces the key issues and debates, as well as the design and ethical challenges raised by digital touch. It shows how touch — how we touch, as well as what, whom and when we touch — is being profoundly reshaped by our use of technologies.
This event will be particularly useful for students, scholars and teachers of Digital Media and Communication Studies, Digital Humanities, Sensory Studies, and Science and Technology Studies.
About the Speakers
- Professor Carey Jewitt
Professor of Technology Interaction, and Chair of the UCL Collaborative Social Science Domain
Her research centres on digital interaction, multimodal communication, touch, methodological innovation, and interdisciplinary research.
- Professor Sara Price
Professor of Digital Learning
Her research draws on theories of embodied cognition and interaction, exploring how mobile, tangible, sensor, VR technologies mediate new forms of interaction, cognition, and communication.
Her work informs theories of embodied learning, technology design and development, and methodological innovation.
Students are welcome to register for the free event at this link.
The publisher’s description of the speakers’ new book, Digital Touch, follows:
Touch matters. It is fundamental to how we know ourselves and each other, and it is central to how we communicate. Digital touch is embedded in many technologies, from wearable devices and gaming hardware to tactile robots and future technologies. What would it be like if we could hug or touch digitally across distance? How might this shape our sense of connection? How might we establish trust or protect our privacy and safety?
Digital Touch is a timely and original book that addresses such questions. Offering a rich account of digital touch, the book introduces the key issues and debates, as well as the design and ethical challenges raised by digital touch. Using clear, accessible examples and creative scenarios, the book shows how touch – how we touch, as well as what, whom and when we touch – is being profoundly reshaped by our use of technologies. Above all, it highlights the importance of digital touch in our daily lives and how it will impact our relationships and way of life in the future.
The first work of its kind, Digital Touch is the go-to book for anyone wanting to get to grips with this crucial emerging topic, especially students and scholars of Digital Media and Communication Studies, Digital Humanities, Sensory Studies, and Science and Technology Studies.
The book is available to TU students through the TU Library Interlibrary Loan (ILL) service.
In a previous coauthored book also available by from the TU Library ILL service, Interdisciplinary Insights for Digital Touch Communication, Professors Jewitt and Price observe:
Advances in the design of digital touch and the importance of touch in communication require social science and designers to understand its place in the sociality of interaction.
Throughout this book, we use the term ‘digital touch’ to emphasize our attention to the social orientation of touch and to refer to the digital-mediation of touch by a broad range of technologies, beyond the hand. We prefer ‘digital touch’ rather than ‘haptic’ which references a technological or physiological orientation and are strongly linked to the hand via its etymological roots ‘grasping’.
Digital touch communication can be co-located or remote, and might involve human-object, human-human, human to robot or robot to human touch.
The importance of touch in human development has long been recognized, however, this sensory feature of human communication is only recently pervading the digital landscape.
Digitally mediated touch matters, it is considered within computer science and HCI to have the most potential of the senses for digital communication and it is the sense most rapidly being developed in the intensification of digital sensory communication (while technologies to synthesise and exploit taste and smell are emerging, their potential for communication is as yet unclear).
The proliferation of digital devices that have escalated communicational capacity through audible, written and visual modes, have also foregrounded debates around touch deprivation. These have been critiqued for reducing or removing touch from the communicational environment, and the limitations of devices to date that support affective touch, which typically focus only on the hand or forearm.
Whilst acknowledging our everyday interaction with touch screens, our focus in this book 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.
Developments in haptic, sensor and touch-related technologies, point to technological opportunities to develop and enhance our touch interaction and communication.
The perceived value of integrating tactile qualities to digital devices, systems and interaction is considerable, given that touch is critical for our physical and emotional well-being, social development and social communication.
More critically, tactile technological ‘innovation’ speaks to the ‘always on’, ‘hyper-attentive’ subject ‘disciplined for tactile calls to attention, a body open to these calls to be productive at all times’.
Across a range of social contexts and technological domains, touch-based technologies promise to supplement, heighten, extend and reconfigure how people (and machines) communicate, leading to new touch-based capacities and practices.
However, this raises significant technical challenges for engineering, computer science and robotics, requiring detailed research into areas such as understanding mechanical touch and physiological touch. It requires complex developments in exploring optimal ways to make robot hands move, for example, or how to build and programme how to ‘sense’, for example through ‘skin’, raising the need to solve issues of creating ‘senses’ not typically present in technology. Alongside these technical drivers of touch-based technologies there are a number of social drivers. Changes in ‘globalisation’ have led to more ‘distant’ relationships – family, friends and romantic partners– generating a perceived demand for generating physical sensations across a distance, extending the ‘touch’ channel of communication remotely.
Opportunities to enhance the quality of life for people with a disability or sensory loss (e.g. of vision) bring digital touch capacities into rehabilitation and prosthetics.
Within robotics the need to develop touch awareness and touch capacity in robotic agents for teleoperation contexts is essential for enhancing robot capability in undertaking delicate operations, such as bomb disposal, and in health care contexts, where robot touch need to effectively convey emotion or meaning through touch, and interpret emotion or meaning through touch. These socially oriented considerations are drivers for technical development and underpin the design and development of many emerging digital touch technologies.
(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)