Touch: Communication of emotion through computational textile expression

Touch of a computational textile on human skin provides a unique opportunity to look at relationships between ambience, emotion and computing. The sense of touch on human skin offers a potential framework to think about ambient computing as the information from skin is multimodal and comes in many forms such as temperature, humidity, sharpness, smoothness, location and movement. Computational materials that shelter, surround and are inside us have become sentient and are able to ‘speak’ to us. It is common that these things not only speak to us but also to each other through what is called the internet of things. This is a physical world web or quite simply a network of physical things. Materials that can connect to this network this author will call computational materials, which are materials that respond to commands and communicate through computer programming, electronics and sensors. A computational textile is a textile that responds to commands through computer programming, electronics and sensors. If architects, artists, designers, engineers and scientists and others could begin to understand the nature of what various textile expressions communicated via touch, then it would be possible to more fully understand the role texture of a computational textile plays in communicating emotion through an object. The author of this paper will present and discuss one project, FELT a 5′ × 6′ wall panel designed to communicate emotion through touch.