Touch me, Feel me, Play with me, as a meditative tool invites people to touch, feel, and move for their own comfort. The aim of this design project is to contribute to the discourse on comfort by investigating the influence on haptic experience, kinetic interaction, and emotion. In this design approach, dialogue between material explorations and bodily sensorial awareness leads to: (1) incongruent tactile feelings of the properties of felted wool; and (2) haptic experience that consists of both touching and seeing, an act that involves not only the hands but also the entire body.

 

In the context of the haptic touching the textile is designed to invite the wearer to create dynamic modes of touch like squeezing, pressing, and stroking. Different modes of touch elicit different level of sensorial responses. By taking these dynamic touches into account, the textile is structured to incorporate an irregular polygon, shaped both concave and convex, to trap air on one side and creating geometric pockets on the reverse side within the felted wool structure. This 3D structure expends different points of body contact in the skin, which enhances sensorial stimulation. Felted wool combined with engineered felt was used as material explorations. This is because felted wool has innate properties such as resilience, versatility, and roughness but still has a feeling of softness and warmth. The quality of the textile is also designed to be open to experience, like to enjoy, to inspire, and to strengthen an individual’s identity. For this reason, the textile can be configured in various ways by bodily interaction, which allows wearers’ to express themselves. Body becomes an essential structure in crafting the form of the textile design.

 

In the context of haptic seeing, the focus is on texture and crafting. The textile is employed with crafting techniques — sewing, folding, and engineered felting. In the design process, the textile can allow people make together through sawing, which can create not only a strong special bond between a person and a group but also personal taste of aesthetic attachment. By taking these crafting techniques into account, the texture of the textile looks very sophisticated and a bit coarse, but maintains still soft texture. In addition, the textile is designed for the users’ act of moving over the textile surface, which makes form discernible. To sum up, by intermingling beneficial properties of felted wool with crafting techniques involved in 3D felted wool structure, the textile can invite people to touch in the various ways of touching modes, which amplify the feelings of mystery for the wearer who enables to elicit mixed emotions. In addition, the fact that textile is designed to be open to experience can lead to express dynamic self-expression. The wearer therefore can experience various feelings and emotions while interaction or even without interaction with the textile form.

 

In conclusion, the design research project contributes to an understanding of what makes the body “feel good or bad” adopted by body-centered and the sense-driven design approaches. In particular, the textile used in the sense-driven action design approach contributes to enhancing the user’s wellbeing and emotional connection to the textile, and therefore are as important as the physical qualities of comfort.