Touch

Catalog description

It is easy to have an idea of the effects of significant loss of vision or hearing by closing our eyes or by wearing earplugs. What about a significant loss of the sense of touch? The answer might not come readily due in part to the subtle, effortless function of this sense. Far from being just an immediate skin sensation, touching is intimately blended into embodied experiences that are affectionate, expressive, personal, and interpersonal. The haptic modality is our fundamental mode of access to the physical world. This course provides a multidisciplinary, cross-cultural introduction to the dynamics and salience of the human sense of touch and traces a continuous thread through a number of fundamental questions and critical approaches related to human haptics. A variety of interpretations, disciplines, and experiences exploring the symbolic, cultural, ethical, social, and technical aspects of touch will be discussed. Topics include social and cultural development, memory, learning, digital design, tactile therapies, human computer interaction, multimodal interaction and sensory substitution, and privacy and security.