Touch Experience & Molding Life
I have been exploring the effect of physical touch since 2012. Thinking about 30 years ago, we exchanged information and expressed emotions by face-to-face chatting or writing letters. We cherished every possibility of communication and connection with others.
Nowadays, global internet makes everything so fast and so easy. We don’t appreciate the connection, and we don’t have deep contact with others anymore.
The Mother of Senses
Physical contact is one of the most effective ways of communication. Even though we used to be so familiar with touch as we were with breathing, it’s often downplayed or disregarded — even within such fields as the history of the body or the history of medicine.
Human skin is the oldest and the most sensitive of our organs, our first medium of communication, and our most efficient protector. Touch is the parent of our eyes, ears, nose and mouth — the mother of senses.
Each owner of a human body is necessarily bound up in the physical. For me, the most exciting aspect of touch is that it is so broadly related to our culture, history, individual personality, human community, sensitive feelings, humanity, sociology, psychology, emotions, biological effects, and our relationship with other species.
Touch as Language
I see touch not only as a special form of meaningful language, connection, and interaction, but also as a representation of the human being — one which effects profoundly in human society and the larger world.
In a world increasingly mediated by screens, this exploration asked a fundamental question: what do we lose when we replace embodied presence with digital proximity? And how might we design technology that restores, rather than replaces, the depth of physical human connection?
Molding Life — Graduate Thesis
This body of research culminated in my RISD graduate thesis and installation, Molding Life. The thesis extended the inquiry from touch into a broader question about human senses and mortality.
Our physical bodies are limited and impermanent. But our senses are boundless, rich, and even immortal. Our senses are the extension of our physical bodies.
The smell, touch, and impression you leave on people could affect them for a long period of time — or even their whole life. In our day-to-day existence, we often send information out in multiple ways we may not notice. We affect other lives, and others affect us in the same ways.
The installation explored how developing technologies have changed human existence — and how the sensory traces we leave behind persist far beyond the physical encounter itself.
Why This Still Matters
This early research into touch and embodied interaction planted a seed that runs through all of my work — the conviction that great design is about what people feel, not just what they accomplish. Whether it’s the warmth of an AI agent’s tone, the trust a clinician feels using a CRM, or the subtle friction that tells a user they’re in control — the sensory and emotional layer is what makes people stay.
The question I asked in 2012 — how does touch shape human connection? — evolved into the question I ask today: how does the feeling of a product shape whether people trust it?