Our ability to communicate through the sense of touch has never been more important, as groundbreaking work takes place to make touch a reality digitally. We also hear about how UCL researchers are reaching beyond their own fields of expertise to make this and other innovations possible.

Professor Carey Jewitt leads the IN-TOUCH project exploring how the digital is reshaping touch as human communication. And as the pandemic fundamentally alters the way we interact with each other, Professor Jewitt’s work highlights the importance of communicating via multimodal (and non-verbal) means.

With a focus on health and wellbeing, leisure, work, learning and personal relationships, IN-TOUCH finds itself engaging with the likes of engineers, computer scientists, designers and engineers to gain innovative insights into the use, design and governance of digitally mediated touch.

This interdisciplinary approach also shines a light on how researchers at UCL are tapping into networks like the Collaborative Social Sciences Domain to develop work that benefits the wider society.

Full show notes, transcript and links: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/ioe/news/2021/jun/getting-feel-interdisciplinary-and-collaborative-research-rftrw-s10e01 

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