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CALL FOR PRESENTATIONS
Participation from interested individuals in all related fields and at all levels of experience is welcome and encouraged! We would be especially curious to hear from early-career researchers, those approaching haptics from Humanities fields, engineers and computer scientists who wish to explore other haptics contexts, and practitioners in the haptics industry.
Please note that the applications for presenting at this workshop are now closed.
BACKGROUND
If we define haptics as the scientific study of touch, the field has nearly a two-hundred year history, dating back to experimental studies on touch perception carried out in Leipzig by E.H. Weber and Gustav Fechner. A more contemporary definition emphasizes the intertwining of these scientific studies of tactility with engineering practice aimed at producing digital devices, including desktop interfaces and robot arms, that can effectively stimulate the sense of touch for communicative purposes.
Whichever definition one adopts, the contemporary field of haptics has been an interdisciplinary endeavor from its start, requiring collaboration among those in fields and disciplines such as Computer Science, Psychophysics, Experimental Psychology, Robotics, Neuroscience, Acoustics, and Mechanical Engineering. Despite this radical interdisciplinarity, haptics has been almost exclusively the domain of these STEM fields and, at least until recently, comparatively underserved by historical, ethnographic, artistic, literary, philosophical, and critical cultural methods and fields.
Of course, touch as a technology and as a problematic occurs periodically in the arts and humanities, from FT Marinetti’s Tactilism manifesto (1911), Salvador Dali’s illustration for a ‘tactile cinema’ (1930), and Walter Benjamin’s famous essay on mechanical reproduction (1935), for example, which reflexively consider the effect on media. Meanwhile, recent European philosophy including Jacques Derrida, Michel Serres, and Richard Kearney, have reconsidered the significance of touch within sensory hierarchies, but only minimally in terms of digital touch.
WORKSHOP OBJECTIVES
This workshop seeks to bring engineering perspectives on haptics into conversation with such historical and cultural approaches to the study of digital touch, with the aim of making these fields’ approaches mutually legible.
In 5-10 minute talks, participants will be asked to briefly share what motivated them to study haptics, describe their methods, identify the most surprising findings from their individual research programs, and then describe and discuss significant obstacles they feel are facing haptics as a field or as an industry at this moment in its history.
Presentations will be followed by breakout group discussions of issues identified during the presentations. Our goals here will be to facilitate dialogue, encourage future collaboration, and articulate the problems and challenges facing haptics today, from the range of perspectives represented in this workshop.
Preliminary program
10:00-10:10 Arrival and personal introductions
10:00-10:20 Mark Paterson, Introduction and framing remarks
10:20-11:10 Participant statements: 5-10 minutes each, depending on number of participants
11:10-11:30 Small group discussion: problems and challenges facing haptics researchers/hapticians
11:30-11:45 Large group discussion: what did we learn from the exchanges?
11:45-11:55 David Parisi, Closing remarks and takeaways
Co-organized by Jeremy Cooperstock (McGill), David Parisi (Charleston), Mark Paterson (U Pittsburgh), and Antoine Weill--Duflos (Haply Robotics)
Keynote bios
David Parisi is a Professor of Emerging Media at the College of Charleston whose research explores the past, present, and possible futures of touch technologies. His book Archaeologies of Touch: Interfacing with Haptics from Electricity to Computing (University of Minnesota Press, 2018) shows how electric shock, experimental psychology, cybernetics, aesthetics, telemanipulation robotics, and virtual reality each participated in a reconceptualization of touch necessary for its integration into contemporary computing technologies. Parisi’s writing on touch and technology has appeared in publications such as Real Life, Logic, TechCrunch, Open!, ROMchip, New Media & Society, Convergence, and Game Studies.
Mark Paterson is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Pittsburgh. He has an interest in the history and science of bodily sensation, blindness, and technologies of the senses. Along with articles published in humanities and social science journals, he is author of books including The Senses of Touch: Haptics, Affects and Technologies (2007), Seeing with the Hands: Blindness, Vision and Touch After Descartes (2016), How We Became Sensorimotor: Movement, Measurement, Sensation (2021), and co-editor of a special issue of ACM Transactions in Human-Robot Interaction (In Press) on affect and embodiment. His current research is concerned with the role of embodiment in the histories of human-robot interactions. His research website is sensory-motor.com