FLESH FEEDBACK: Mark Paterson, 'Mediated Social Touch'

Please join us for the third event of our IDM X Onassis ONX fall speaker series FLESH FEEDBACK: DESIGNING WEARABLE SENSATIONS with Mark Paterson (University of Pittsburgh), Friday 11/8 3-4:30 PM in Room 325 at 370 Jay Street Brooklyn, NY.

Event specifics: RSVP required for non-NYU guests through Eventbrite! Every outside visitor must be registered and provide a unique non-NYU email address. On the day of the event, you'll receive an email pass, bring identification and the pass (you do not need to print it out) for security.

Mediated Social Touch: What kinds of touch are we engineering?
The idea of ‘Mediated Social Touch’ is having something of a moment in design, engineering and robotics. The idea extends existing haptics work on the engineering of the presence of another at a distance. Yet their explicit aspiration to “enhance feelings of social presence and emotional closeness” (Haans & Ijsselsteijn 2006) is something which other designers and researchers are now waking up to. How is the social aspect of ‘mediated social touch’ being achieved in industry and academia? This talk will be illustrated with brief examples of past and present experiments in this area, from haptic interfaces, experiments in interaction design, and human-robot interaction.

Bio: Mark Paterson is Professor of Sociology at the University of Pittsburgh. He has an interest in the history and science of bodily sensation, and technologies of the senses. He is author of books including The Senses of Touch: Haptics, Affects and Technologies (Routledge, 2007), Seeing with the Hands: Blindness, Vision and Touch After Descartes (Edinburgh UP, 2016), How We Became Sensorimotor: Movement, Measurement, Sensation (University of Minnesota Press, 2021), and most recently Affective Touching: Neurobiology and Technological Applications (Cambridge UP, In Press). His current research is concerned with the role of design and the ‘engineered imaginary’ of robot embodiments and human-robot interactions. His research website is http://sensory-motor.com

About the Fall ‘24 Speaker Series: FLESH FEEDBACK: DESIGNING WEARABLE SENSATIONS

With the ubiquitous adoption and domestication of wearable devices that continually feed us streams and bursts of data relayed through touch, we’ve already become acclimated to practices of remote haptic sensing, knowing, communicating, and socializing. An emerging generation of wearables, with varying degrees of success, attempt to route more complex, engaging, and affectively compelling forms of touch through these contacts opened up between flesh and technology. At the same time, these new material intimacies with data expose us to a range of vulnerabilities, as our bodies can be monitored and remotely stimulated, often without our consent. Often ideated as our most ‘ancient’ sense–or alternatively as a ‘neglected’ sense–touch takes center stage in this year’s IDM X Onassis speaker series, as a compelling mix of artists, designers, industry professionals, and academics each take up questions about our changing embodied relationships with digital technologies.

Host or Publisher Brooklyn Experimental Media Center at NYU Tandon School of Engineering