Hapticity in Digital Education Atmosphere

This article focuses on the effects of the decreased ability to perceive touch in distance learning for all of the actors in architectural design studios during the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. As part of face-to-face architectural pedagogy, the tactile experience of architectural materials, models, and corporeality in the studio environment assumes great importance. However, in contrast, these aspects are diminished when it comes to digital education, generating new topics for discussion. This article asks how and to what extent distance education models can affect the process of learning, understanding, discussing, and designing architecture, amidst the prospect of continuous digital education in the post-pandemic period. Hence, it examines the awareness and experiences of haptic perception of first-year students at the Istanbul Aydın University Department of Architecture through in-depth interviews recorded on Zoom. Between 2020 and 2021, the interviews investigated haptic perception, observed construction techniques, factors affecting design materials, the way and place in which materials were perceived, the methods of sharing and transferring designs with studio instructors, questions about the obstacles encountered, and expectations for the post-pandemic period. The outcomes of these in-depth interviews showed that there is a close relationship between the students’ bodily interests and their awareness with regards to perceiving materials and that the former indicated a tendency towards making models. It was observed that students had preferred digital design tools in the pre-pandemic period, and in addition to the digital tools that students often use as a design approach, they negotiated as designing through hand-drawing in order to gain the “thinking with one’s hands” experience in this study. This emphasizes the need for haptic experiences in an architectural educational environment.

Rethinking contact: the haptic in the viral era

The current pandemic emergency due to Covid-19 has profoundly changed our sensory habits. What role can be assigned to a synaesthetic perceptive modality like the haptic in this no touching pandemic period (Žižek 2020)? This paper argues that the haptic specificity could go beyond the dialectic between touch and vision to focus on its phantasmagorical potentiality. In an attempt to grasp the relevance of this perceptive modality in the pandemic and post-pandemic scenario, this contribution will proceed in two directions. First, starting from an etymological premise and an iconographic excursus, it will highlight the motility and the potential in absentia as the proprium of haptic perception. Secondly, we will hypothesize the configuration of a synaesthetic and intermedial “haptic feeling” shaped by the accumulation of images of everyday pandemic life — phantasmata, eidolons and pictures — can disclose an infra-subtle space, substantially affective, which precedes and exceeds the contact itself.

Adapting the visuo-haptic perception through muscle coactivation

While the nervous system can coordinate muscles’ activation to shape the mechanical interaction with the environment, it is unclear if and how the arm’s coactivation influences visuo-haptic perception and motion planning. Here we show that the nervous system can voluntarily coactivate muscles to improve the quality of the haptic percept. Subjects tracked a randomly moving visual target they were physically coupled to through a virtual elastic band, where the stiffness of the coupling increased with wrist coactivation. Subjects initially relied on vision alone to track the target, but with practice they learned to combine the visual and haptic percepts in a Bayesian manner to improve their tracking performance. This improvement cannot be explained by the stronger mechanical guidance from the elastic band. These results suggest that with practice the nervous system can learn to integrate a novel haptic percept with vision in an optimal fashion.

Bilaterally Shared Haptic Perception for Human-Robot Collaboration in Grasping Operation

Tactile sensations are crucial for achieving precise operations. A haptic connection between a human operator and a robot has the potential to promote smooth human-robot collaboration (HRC). In this study, we assemble a bilaterally shared haptic system for grasping operations, such as both hands of humans using a bottle cap-opening task. A robot arm controls the grasping force according to the tactile information from the human that opens the cap with a finger-attached acceleration sensor. Then, the grasping force of the robot arm is fed back to the human using a wearable squeezing display. Three experiments are conducted: measurement of the just noticeable difference in the tactile display, a collaborative task with different bottles under two conditions, with and without tactile feedback, including psychological evaluations using a questionnaire, and a collaborative task under an explicit strategy. The results obtained showed that the tactile feedback provided the confidence that the cooperative robot was adjusting its action and improved the stability of the task with the explicit strategy. The results indicate the effectiveness of the tactile feedback and the requirement for an explicit strategy of operators, providing insight into the design of an HRC with bilaterally shared haptic perception.

Corporeality: a haptic space

<div>The hegemony of vision and the suppression of other sensory realms has led to an architecture distanced from the human body. Undoubtedly, vision has the ability to receive the greatest amount of information from our surroundings; hence, it has been considered as primary to our perception. However, its interconnection with other bodily sensations is essential to perceive the totality of space; this connection also compensates for the limitations of sight. The purpose of this critique is not to demonize visuality; it is to consider the rhizomatic and interconnected nature of haptic perception of space. Approaching corporeality results in haptic spaces that enhance or suppress our bodily experience of spatial qualities while sharpening our visual experience. A haptic space will introduce more possibilities for bodily actions by focusing on spatiality, unifying the architecture of the foreground with the background. The concept of spatiality merges space and movement of the body, and therefore it can support or suppress the actions. These actions are subjectively performed based on perceived spatial opportunities through haptic perception. The thesis is intended to explore possibilities embedded within haptic space to create a richer architectural experience. It will explore the spatial interconnections between haptic perception, somatosensory system, vision and consequently bodily movements.</div>

Corporeality: a haptic space

<div>The hegemony of vision and the suppression of other sensory realms has led to an architecture distanced from the human body. Undoubtedly, vision has the ability to receive the greatest amount of information from our surroundings; hence, it has been considered as primary to our perception. However, its interconnection with other bodily sensations is essential to perceive the totality of space; this connection also compensates for the limitations of sight. The purpose of this critique is not to demonize visuality; it is to consider the rhizomatic and interconnected nature of haptic perception of space. Approaching corporeality results in haptic spaces that enhance or suppress our bodily experience of spatial qualities while sharpening our visual experience. A haptic space will introduce more possibilities for bodily actions by focusing on spatiality, unifying the architecture of the foreground with the background. The concept of spatiality merges space and movement of the body, and therefore it can support or suppress the actions. These actions are subjectively performed based on perceived spatial opportunities through haptic perception. The thesis is intended to explore possibilities embedded within haptic space to create a richer architectural experience. It will explore the spatial interconnections between haptic perception, somatosensory system, vision and consequently bodily movements.</div>

A Sticky Situation or Rough Going? Influencing Haptic Perception of Wood Coatings Through Frictional and Topographical Design

Improving the tactile aesthetics of products that can be described as touch intensive is an increasing priority within many sectors, including the furniture industry. Understanding which physical characteristics contribute to the haptic experience of a surface, and how, is therefore highly topical. It has earlier been shown that both friction and topography affect tactile perception. Thus, two series of stimuli have been produced using standard coating techniques, with systematic variation in (physical) friction and roughness properties. This was achieved through appropriate selection of matting agents and resins. The stimuli sets were then evaluated perceptually to determine the extent to which discrimination between pairs of surfaces followed the systematic materials variation. In addition to investigating the role of the physical properties in discrimination of the surfaces, their influence on perceived pleasantness and naturalness was also studied. The results indicate that changes in tactile perception can be understood in terms of friction and roughness, and that varying the matting agents (topography) and resins (material properties) in the coatings provide the controlling factors for furniture applications. Perceived pleasantness is associated with low friction and smoother topography, whilst perceived naturalness is found to be described by an interaction between tactile friction and the average maximum peak height of the surface features. Graphic Abstract