Sensory Perception & Interaction Research Group

As a central aspect of human physical and emotional experience, affect needs to be incorporated into the discipline of haptic experience design, which is emerging alongside the last decade’s maturation of haptic technology. Meanwhile, haptic science fields such as neuroscience and cognitive and social psychology are contributing to knowledge of affective mechanisms and behavior. However, developments in these three areas are often siloed, due to the complexity of the systems being studied or built, diversity of methods employed and distance between the home disciplines of the respective researchers. To facilitate greater bridging, this article offers a glimpse of how practitioners of haptic design conceptualize their work, and ways in which researchers working in these disciplines can jointly identify and fill gaps.