Sensory Perception & Interaction Research Group

Haptic representations need to support human goals, capabilities, and desires. Thus a challenge is to create usable and intuitive haptic representations of intangible real-world ideas. To support this challenge of designing better haptic interfaces, we need better abstract representations of haptic signals, and of the space the signals represent. These representations will (a) help designers explore the design space in a structured way; (b) facilitate communication among haptic practitioners – improving design practices more broadly; and, (c) potentially enlarge the design space, because exploration of alternatives can reveal gaps and areas for improvement. In this paper, we introduce a possible design space with the goal of raising questions about how to represent relationships between social & technical information and physical haptic signals.