One of the things that social and cultural research on touch attempts to grapple with is everything people are supposed to touch and not supposed to touch—and what we actually end up touching or not touching in any given situation. When I first saw Sameer D’Costa’s photo on Flickr, it reminded me of people’s desire to touch things that we aren’t supposed to, and I wondered what that might mean in terms of research.

A year later we’re excited to share the result of that wondering: re/touch, an online resource for designers and researchers interested in touch-based interactions and relations. As the action of touch is technologically mediated by both contactless interactions in the world and through multi-touch on screen, awareness and reflection on the richness of touch is becoming increasingly important.

The re/touch website

re/touch brings together hundreds of cross-cultural examples of social norms and values involving touch—all categorised according to actions related to touching.

A collection of quotes from ethnographic accounts written between the late 1800s and the present, re/touch encourages designers and researchers to explore how touch is used by people to relate to one another and the worlds in which we live.

You can browse the quotes to create design briefs, refine interaction scenarios or otherwise inspire you to think, make or do things touch-related.

About the project

We like to think of re/touch as a work-in-progress. So far, it contains almost five hundred quotes from dozens of cultural groups around the world, and we’re working to add more. As the collection grows, we expect the action tags to change as well, so over the next couple of months you may notice different words in the tag cloud. In the end, we anticipate having over one thousand quotes and more than fifty categories of touch-related action.

The re/touch website also includes some background information on the content, and we plan to publish a paper on the research methodology and some thoughts on collaborations between anthropology and design.

If you notice any database problems or errors, please leave a comment below and we’ll look into it. We’re also still working on the web design—including making the site work well and look good on the iPhone—so we’d certainly appreciate any feedback you might have along those lines as well.

Ultimately, we hope you’ll find this resource as interesting and inspiring as we do!

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Three recent Touch projects suggest different senses as metaphors for physical RFID interaction:

Silje Søftings Pling Plong project uses an eye as the ‘reader’ of audiobook tokens.

Bilal Chaudhry & Marius Johansen’s project Le Chef uses a huge tongue giving the appearance that the chef character is tasting the food tokens that are placed on it.

Sara Johansson’s Sniff project uses the nose of a toy dog as the reader, giving the impression that the dog is sniffing token objects.

Are these other human senses more successful than touch in creating the right kind of metaphors for RFID interaction? Can we use human senses as metaphors to create a richer design space for RFID, or does the inspiration have to come from somewhere else?

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This collection of ‘vernacular’ designs for RFID-based interfaces is extremely interesting for us, as we delve deeper into the visual representation of emerging technologies.

If you have images of good, bad and especially odd interfaces where interaction with an RFID tag or NFC mobile phone is indicated with an icon or an interestingly designed physical enclosure, please add it to the pool by tagging it ‘touch interface’.

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In March 2006 Fourth year interaction design students at AHO conducted intense one-week investigations into Near Field Communication in a project called Touchable services. See more student projects.

Anette Andersen and Jørn Knutsen worked with the web service Underskog (the undergrowth). Underskog is infamous in Norway as one of the first social networking services, it offers event calendaring, collaborative weblogs, discussions and is invite only. It is shining example of situated software.

In their analysis, the students listed the strengths and weaknesses of the online service. Underskog is really good at handling the time before an event. It answers many of the questions that arise: Is anyone I know planning going? What does it cost? What do other people think of the place? Where do I get tickets? Where exactly is it? What kind of people are coming? I want to let other people know I’m going.

What Underskog currently is not good at is the time during an event: Are any of my friends here? Where are all my friends? He should be here by now? I’m bored, what else is going on? I want to let my friends know I’m here.

They designed a simple system that would log users into venues by touching a tag in the venue. Users would then rate events by touching a happy or sad face. The use of RFID-tags placed around arenas and events would allow for very quick ‘swipes’ or ‘touches’ to indicate presence and ratings, this is particularly important in a context where interacting with a screen may be socially inappropriate.

Through the use of scenarios the students demonstrated the usage of such a system. The mobile interface told you how many of your contacts were there, and also if your contacts were somewhere else. It also sent information back to Underskog.no where information would appear on a map.

Being a one week project, they did not look into detail what the advantages of this system may be over other forms of communication like SMS or simple mobile internet. But what is particularly interesting about this service is that the RFID tags can be placed by anybody on any venue, becoming a parasite of existing infrastructures much like Underskog itself. The service is potentially totally user-driven, and doesn’t require venues to sign up to the service in order for it to be useful.

See more at Jørn’s weblog.

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Understanding ritual has long been the domain of anthropology, but one of my professors in graduate school was fond of reminding students that ritual is not just the domain of other, more exotic cultures, or of the intellectually-suspect religious amongst us. If nothing else, ritual is as mundane and crucial as everyday life. In New York, Charlie, Richard Coyne and I also spent some time discussing the religiosity of famous philosophers and theorists, and how embodied ritual is a way for different people with different orientations and directives to come together. Although these activities can involve the magical, they share more in common with Matt Jones’ recent descriptions of play, and Blast Theory or Jane McGonigal’s sense of games. Charlie also alluded to this in his talk when he connected the liturgy to the spectacular (one good reason not to abandon the Situationists in discussions of locative technologies!) and I think there are some interesting, and underexplored, connections between bricolage, hacking, syncretism and ritual.
In Touch in art and elsewhere, a small online exhibition he’s just curated for low-fi.org.uk, Charlie recalls bits of our conversations and continues to inspire me:

“Recently, for various reasons, I have become interested in the question of touch, in art and elsewhere. We live in a world in which the ways in which we can communicate with each other become more and more immaterial, incorporeal and virtual, particularly through the increased use and greater ubiquity of digital technologies. In this context touch is often occluded and, at the same time, overly fetishised. In the last half century or so, there has been an increasing interest in touch in art, especially in relation to performance and telematic works, that may be a response to the increasing virtualisation of culture, though the question of touch can be traced in far older works, particularly some of those dealing with the life of Christ, which is, whether we are religious or otherwise, the founding myth of Western culture, and which has determined much of our understanding of questions of presence and absence, corporeality and spirituality, and our relation to the senses and thus to touch.”

Like Charlie, I’m interested in cultural practices surrounding what can, and cannot, touch. Applied to RFID and Near-Field Communication, this becomes a question of connecting some things and disconnecting others. Put another way: whether we’re concerned with issues of technological privacy or publicity in our everyday lives, I believe we’re well served by a stronger understanding of cross-cultural examples of ritualised contact and avoidance. It’s my hope that the Touchpædia will be a step in that direction, and I’m looking forward to seeing where it might lead.

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Where I’m coming from

As it so happened, I had also recently finished reading Constance Classen’s wonderful edited volume, The Book of Touch. Unique in its approach, it begins a cultural history of touch, and starts to draw out our cross-cultural experiences of touch. Of special interest to me was her claim that a cultural understanding of touch was probably best served not by detached or objective intellectual analysis, but rather by a “rough and ready approach that acknowledges and grapples with the tangled, bumpy and sticky nature of the topic.”

I was taught, and I now teach students, that it’s always a good idea to start any research project with a literature review. Not only does this help the researcher better understand the field in which they seek to intervene, and locate them within that field, but it helps identify strengths and weaknesses, or gaps in the existing research that can provide points of entry to further understanding.

But how could I turn the rather stodgy academic lit review into something “rough and ready” for other researchers and designers to work with? Well, one possibility was compiling a cultural encyclopædia of touch, and so my first contribution to the project will be the Touchpædia.

What’s the Touchpædia?

The content of the Touchpædia will be organised thematically – along the lines of “touch as contamination” and “touch as pleasure” or “touch as magic” and “touch as pain” etc. – and each entry will include the following:

1) a summary of current social and cultural research;

2) suggestions for further reading;

2) possible research questions, focussed on design and material culture;

3) possible ethnographic research methodologies, focussing on participatory, performative and playful engagement;

4) simple design briefs.

In other words, there’s lots more good stuff to come before summer 2007 and we’re excited!

And last, but certainly not least, we’re really looking forward to hearing people’s thoughts and sharing our experiences along the way. Cheers.

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I’ve had trouble justifying my excitement about this intricate visual detail, so I thought it would be good to collect a bunch of examples from over fifty years of information design history, to show it as a powerful visual element in ubicomp situations.

Even though the dashed line has emerged from a designer’s shorthand and from the limitations of monotone printing techniques, it has a clear and simple visual magic, the ability to express something three- or four-dimensional in two dimensions.

The dashed line as hidden geometry

Examples from Open Here: The Art of Instructional Design, Paul Mijksenaar, Piet Westendorp, 1999.

The dashed line as movement

The line is used to indicate temporal positions:

Examples from Open Here: The Art of Instructional Design, Paul Mijksenaar, Piet Westendorp, 1999.

The dashed line as paths

Very similar to the representations of movement, but the line is used as the path itself:

Examples from Open Here: The Art of Instructional Design, Paul Mijksenaar, Piet Westendorp, 1999.

A more modern image showing an overview of Auto ID RFID supply chain management, by Xplane:

Colin Ware defines dashed, dotted or wavy lines as linking lines:

“A linking line between entities represents some kind of relationship between them. A line linking closed contours can have different colours or other graphical qualities such as waviness, and this effectively represents an attribute or type of relationship.”

From the perceptual syntax of diagrams in Information Visualisation: Perception for Design, Colin Ware, 1999.

The dashed line as expectation

I’ve spoken to some people that have made an association between the dashed line and an ellipsis. This example is taken from the Mac OS X interface, conventionally used to indicate that the action will be followed by another action.

The dashed line as ephemeral material

Examples from Open Here: The Art of Instructional Design, Paul Mijksenaar, Piet Westendorp, 1999.

The dashed line as border or seams

A table of commonly used conventions from Information Graphics, Robert Harris, 1996.

Other examples

This is an example of dashed lines in information design from The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, Edward Tufte, 1983. I get the sense that Tufte prefers a simple, solid line, considering the overuse of patterns a form of chart-junk:

And lastly, an interesting thought from a conversation with Dave Gray, of Xplane and Communication nation:

“I think of lines: double-line, solid, dashed, dotted Similar to typeface conventions such as black, bold, regular, light. It’s a matter of emphasis. The thicker and more solid the line, the stronger the emphasis. A dotted line usually does not indicate “cut here” unless it is combined with a scissors icon. I think that trying to make a direct connection between the dashed line and what it represents may be a red herring. Think of a map, for example: Whether type is bold, all caps, or light relates directly to the designer’s decisions about emphasis, but I am not sure it relates so directly to the subject matter. There are a few direct correlations of this type: for example, type representing water is usually set in italic. I like your use of the dashed line – it is clear that they serve as a guide and invitation to “place things there”.”

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A selection of images from submitted papers, click for larger image.

The diverse range of topics and the varied backgrounds of the applicants for our Nordichi workshop in October is promising for a topic that spans architecture, hci, computer science, interaction and industrial design. We are really looking forward to seeing everyone in Oslo.

These are the 15 accepted papers:

Bootstrapping the Internet of Things
Claus Dahl, Imity

CybStickers – Simple Shared Ubiquitous Annotations for All
Odd-Wiking Rahlff, Sintef. (See also Cybstickers)

Designing Expressive Near Field Interactions
Johan Sandsjö, Hidden Interaction

Designing social affordances for material objects
Ulla-Maaria Mutanen & Matt Biddulph, University of Helsinki (See also Thinglink)

Everyday Intelligence
Gill Wildman, Plot (See the Everyday Intelligence film)

*The Kinetic User Interface *
Vincenzo Pallotta, Béat Hirsbrunner, Pervasive and Artificial Intelligence Research Group, University of Fribourg, Switzerland

Mobile Prosumer
Florian Resatsch, Stephan Karpischek & Daniel Michelis, IEB, University of Arts Berlin

PERvasive serviCe Interaction
John Hamard, DoCoMo Euro-Labs

RFID work
Morten Borup Harning RFIDsec

Responsible design of connected objects
Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino

Security Aspects in Design of Touch-based Applications
Janne Jalkanen, Nokia

Social Construction Kits for Kids, Digital Infrastructures for Pervasive Play
Martin Brynskov, Interactive Spaces, University of Aarhus

Unconscious Kitchen, Everyday domestic behaviors & Blackbox, Public Energy Awareness
Joseph Yang

Use of Near Field Communication in emergency Rescue situations
Gunnar Kramp, Aarhus School of Architecture

Waschsalon mobile service
Chris Woebken

You can only touch what is there
Chris Heathcote, Nokia

We also had expressions of interest from Willem Velthoven with the Symbolic Table and Rob van Kranenburg. We’ll keep in touch and hope you can attend.

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“develop an understanding of how mobile devices (particularly mobile phones, smartphones and PDAs) can be used as interaction devices. [...] we aim to develop new ideas on how mobile phones can be exploited for new forms of interaction with the environment.”

The other papers at the workshop look interesting:

• Telling a Story on a Tag: The Importance of Markers’ Visual Design for Real World Applications, Enrico Costanza (MIT Media Lab, USA), Mirja Leinss (Harvard GSD, USA)
• Mobile Pointing & Input System for Eye Glass Display, Youngjin Hong, Sanggoog Lee, Yongbeom Lee, Sangryong Kim (Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology, South Korea)
• User Perceptions on Mobile Interaction with Visual and RFID Tags, Sara Belt (University of Oulu, Finland), Dan Greenblatt, Jonna Häkkilä (Nokia Multimedia, Finland), Kaj Mäkelä (Nokia Research Center, Finland)
• Hovering: Visualising RFID Hyperlinks in a Mobile Phone, Pasi Välkkynen (VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland)
• The Mobile Phone as a Universal Interaction Device – Are There Limits?, Christof Roduner (ETH Zurich, Switzerland)
• Alternative RFID based Architectures for Mobile HCI with Physical Objects, Stefano Puglia (WLAB Ltd., Italy), Andrea Vitaletti (University of Rome “La Sapienza”, Italy)
• Automatic Composition in Service Browsing Environments, Paul Wisner (Nokia Research Center, USA)
• Constructing assemblies for purposeful interactions, Pollini Alessandro, Grönvall Erik (University of Siena, Italy)
• Finding the Path from Here to There: Some Questions about Physical-Mobile Design Processes, Amnon Dekel (The Hebrew University Jerusalem, Israel)
• Understanding Real World Practices: a Place-Centred Study of Mobile Workers, Darragh Murphy, Iride Bartolucci, Luigina Ciolfi (University of Limerick, Ireland)
• Public Display Advertising Based on Bluetooth Device Presence, Matthew Sharifi, Terry Payne, Esther David (University of Southampton, UK)

• Exploiting incidental interactions between mobile devices, Jamie Lawrence, Terry Payne, Raul V. Kripalani (University of Southampton, UK)

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Nokia 3220 NFC Shell

NFC is interesting for us because it enables connections between mobile phones and real-world objects: bridging the gap between the real and the virtual. The project offers the possibility of radically simplifying existing applications and providing a new spectrum of local services through the mobile phone. At AHO we have multiple disciplines, including interaction design, industrial design, urbanism and architecture; a group with significant interest in the areas possibilities of NFC technology.

About Touch

The Touch project aims to strengthen research and industry in Norway into user-centred applications of emerging NFC technology. It aims to understand the way people will use tangible, digital objects as part of their daily lives, and to discover the information systems underlying those interactions.

Touch is not a pure technology project; NFC platforms and specifications are already well developed and documented. Instead we are taking a user-centred approach, and focusing on the social motivations behind the use of technology. With this process it will hopefully uncover unexpected uses, and significant untapped markets for the technology.

NFC offers the possibility to radically simplify existing applications and providing entirely new services. This has significant potential to drive innovation in areas such as retail, marketing, and public services, and offers strong potential for emergent social and communicative uses.

The project covers three distinct areas

1. Social and communication. This is a promising area for significant, emergent, potentially unexpected uses, particularly in areas of personal information management, location-based services and social networking.
2. Public services. This area looks at the ways that new touch-based interactions could access public data or services in safe, democratic, appropriate and efficient ways.
3. Retail, services and marketing. Exploring changes to the way we interact with retail services, looking at (but not limited to) payment for both products and services, automated check-out, product information, extended services and relationships, recycling, and tracking products through their cradle to cradle life-cycle.

Touch has a number of formal and informal partnerships within industry and academia. Among these partnerships are Telenor, Opera, Sintef, University of Oslo and the Interactive Institute Göteborg.

Simple scenarios

As part of the advocacy and initial research process we have developed some very simple scenarios to explain the potential of NFC interactions. (Drawings by Lars Haaland).

Transfer and exchange

Tags as gifts

Simple wayfinding

About Timo Arnall

Timo Arnall is a lecturer at AHO, an interaction designer and researcher currently researching in the fields of NFC and RFID. Timo’s research areas include tangible and social interaction, marking in public space, spatial annotation and locative media.

In May 2004 Timo ran a workshop on locative media and public space at the AHO conference Spark: Design and Locality. He has since presented his research at ISEA 2004 in Helsinki, Art+Communication in Riga, at the Interactive institute in Göteborg, and at CHI2005 in Portland, Oregon. In December 2004 he was involved in a seminar on Social Software at Intermedia in Oslo.

Timo Arnall’s paper ’Marking in public space’ was accepted to the Engaging the City workshop at CHI 2005, organised by Intel (US), University of Surrey (UK), Portland State University (US) and Carnegie Mellon University (US). At this workshop Timo looked at ideas for encouraging civic engagement in public space, and gave other researchers an insight into ongoing research into the marking of public space.

About Interaction Design at AHO

The Interaction Design department at AHO has a goal of building up a group comprising lecturers, researchers and PHD students, in which we excel at creative, relevant interactive work that communicates to end users. To do this, we are creating an atmosphere of creativity and collaboration where we collaborate across disciplines and encourage working in multi-disciplinary teams. The department has a focus on (amongst other subjects) physical computing, social computing, experience- and strategic-design.

The department works closely with Norwegian Industry. A recent success story in collaboration involved ASONO incorporating student work in the final design. In addition, students have been working on the Snøhetta modular house, and some of their ideas are likely to be put into production. The ERA World Congress for Design has commissioned two pieces of work from AHO students. One is an installation and one is a monument to mark the event.

Interaction Design is an area showing explosive growth. All of our students have successfully managed to find jobs, and several students have experienced strong competition to get hold of them.

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