AUTHOR=Mader Angelika , Dertien Edwin , Weda Judith , van Erp Jan 

TITLE=Tinkering with social touch technology

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Computer Science

VOLUME=Volume 5 - 2023

YEAR=2023

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/computer-science/articles/10.3389/fcomp.2023.848023

DOI=10.3389/fcomp.2023.848023

ISSN=2624-9898

ABSTRACT=Social touch technology, haptic technology to mediate social touch interactions, potentially
and potentially contributes to reducing negative effects of skin hunger and social isolation. The field is in development and while there are a number of prototypes, few became products and less persisted in the market today. Viable social touch technology is essential for research on social touch and it has an unexplored market potential. 

Making prototypes and evaluating them is the approach of generating knowledge in Research through Design (RtD). In RtD, researchers investigate the speculative future, probing on what the world could and should be, leaving the exact method of designing prototypes open. One possible method is tinkering, characterized by a playful and creative exploration. 
Tinkering environments, however, need themselves a careful design of toolkits and setting. 
In this paper we report on the toolkit and setup we used for a tinkering based teaching unit on social touch technology held within an introductory course of an Interaction Technology master programme and describe the resulting prototypes.
With a qualitative analysis of the results we consider the teaching unit as a success,
w.r.t. the diversity of the concepts developed.
Tinkering is well known as a playful method for education in Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths, aiming at school children and high school students. It is not yet established as a design method in itself, and not considered as element of an academic skill set.
Here, we argue that tinkering is a valuable design method in the context of social touch technology, and that it has a place in the design approaches within an academic setting.
In a further step  we also want to include experts from other domains in the design process, such as psychologists  or fashion designers. For that end we suggest expanding a current toolkit for wearable technology with concepts from the teaching unit, more scaffolding tools, a variety of tactile actuators, and a software tool that allow for (re)configuring designs rather than programming them.