Towards Caring Touch From Technologies: Knowledge From Healthcare Practitioners

We present a qualitative study with five healthcare experts spe-cialised in different types of touch practice to gain insight in how caring touch can be enacted. Through our analysis we focus onhow to transfer this learning into design considerations towards enacting caring touch from technologies. Despite the rapidly growing expectation for and design interest in touch from technologies intending to enhance care and well-being, the knowledge on how to design caring touch is still fragmented. How caring touch is enacted in inter-personal touch is under-explored and such expertise from healthcare practitioners has not been engaged from the perspective of HCI design research. We propose designers to consider caring as an experiential quality instead of a division between instrumental types of touch and caring types. We recommend when designing for a caring quality in technology-initiated touch that designers create a progression of touch with dynamic sensitivity and adapt the materiality of actuating devices to the plural dimensions of the body’s textures.