This podcast episode is a little different from our usual interviews. Unlocking Touch uses imaginative sound design, emotionally gripping narrative, and powerful invitations to engage in simple physical practices, to tell the story of Mary’s journey through the COVID19 pandemic. The very rooms in which the listener lives become the setting for this compelling story…… Continue reading Unlocking Touch

In this episode, Lili Golmohammadi catches up with Dr Ned Barker to hear about his research into advanced robots in industrial settings. Every industrial revolution, or major technological advancement, transforms the role of touch in making things and the social and sensory experience of work. This has not simply been a story of production being taken out of the hands of workers by automated processes. Who touches what, why, and how, has been a longstanding feature of our sociological and political life – especially when it comes to the touching of dirty and dangerous materials. With all the current technological changes afoot, what types of touch do we want to see developing? And what alternatives might there be to the well-known utopian/dystopian cultural imaginations of robots and industrial touch?

In this episode, we dive into some of these themes, which emerged through Ned’s time in a waste management centre, a glass bottle factory, and a leading robotics company, as well as through interviews with world-leading roboticists.

In this episode, Lili Golmohammadi and Kerstin Leder Mackley speak to former teacher Caroline Coster about relearning and reconfiguring touch after quadruple amputations.

We explore Caroline’s modified touch experiences, including issues of touch sensitivity and the use of digital and analogue tools for navigating everyday life.

New digital processes are changing how garments are designed and developed. From wearable electronics to motion capture, to crafting a pattern on a virtual mannequin, what does rapid digitisation in fashion education and industry mean for touch? Has the role of touch and tactile material engagement in the garment design development process been fully understood yet? How does one go about studying touch practices in the contemporary fashion studio?

In this episode, Lili Golmohammadi speaks to UAL lecturer, researcher, and fellow IN-TOUCH PhD candidate Douglas Atkinson about how he came to frame his study, and the ethnographic approaches he employed to understand how fashion students and tutor-practitioners use touch. Now in the final stages of the PhD, Douglas reflects on how digital touch technologies might best support fashion designers’ touch practices in the future.

In this episode, Carey and Lili of In-Touch speak to multimedia artist, experience designer, and scholar Yiota Demetriou about ‘To You’, a touch-sensitive book of love letters. At first sight, the book appears to be made of blank, inked pages, but when warmed by human touch, its words gradually appear to the reader. Yiota talks us through the process of writing and designing this unique form of reading experience, which requires patience, care, affection and sometimes even tactile collaboration to be read… *This podcast was recorded pre-lock down!

In our first podcast, Lili from the In-Touch project speaks to Tim Neumann, of the UCL Knowledge Lab about his experiences of auditory-tactile synaesthesia. The podcast was recorded in one of the Institute of Education's music rooms so that Tim could talk us through the range of tactile effects produced for him by certain piano notes.