‘Tele_Trust’ and ‘Touch My Touch’: co-creating social touch and trust experience through telematic platforms

Abstract

‘Can telematic platforms be created to share embodied experience of social touch?’. This paper addresses the design of shared presence via telematic platforms, on the basis of shared embodied experience of touching and feeling touched, in empathic interplay. Two Artistic Social Labs platforms that re-orchestrate and merge visual, haptic and facial input, supported by telematic platforms, are discussed and analysed. The hybrid platform ‘Tele_Trust’ (2009) makes use of smart textiles with touch sensors, and mobile phone app and urban screen technologies. The online platform ‘Touch My Touch’ (2021) is based on streaming, face-recognition and portrait merging technologies. The CITYO model ‘Can I Touch You Online?’ (Lancel 2023) is used to analyse and evaluate the effects of design choices on the experience of social touch. The results show that a sense of reciprocal influence (characteristic to social touch) can be established via telematic platforms, through sensory and social design for co-creation. Additional results provide insights for the future design of shared presence, through experience of social touch in reciprocal empathic interplay, via telematic platforms.