UX of Skin: Touching Base — Week 1

Nov 12, ’21 — Nov 18, ‘21

Task: Design a way to express the skin/world interface.

Group: Prashanthi Balachander, Dora Alvarez, Anya Li, Jacob Tomes and me (Ranga)

Our group

Research methods: AEIOU Framework and Speed Dating

First thing, everyone wanted to do a brainstorming session to discuss the properties and characteristics of skin. We decided that the AEIOU method which was to be used for this brief was the best way to approach this step and listed out all of our thoughts. The next step was to identify the ideas that were the most promising.

Thinking up things and looking them up

The first idea was using stimulators to accentuate the sensations in particular areas through the skin. The second idea was proposing a speculative design to put forward the idea of humans having the ability to be able to change their skin colour and to be easily adaptable to any newfound environment. Our main inspiration for this particular idea was the octopus. The third idea was to recreate the human touch to achieve an emotional connection to skin. This was inspired by an act of kindness in Brazil — the pandemic patients were provided with a robotic arm to feel like they had some touching contact in their last moments. We decided to combine all three ideas for our project.

Sketchy ideas being sketched

Our group had an evolving design process that improvised a lot of ideas along the way. The first idea was to use a substitute for skin to cover every day objects to increase emotional connection. We decided to use chicken skin as a substitute to human skin. For this experiment we used objects such as coffee cups or computer mouse and keyboard. We noticed that this experiment did not yield the desired result.

We turned chicken skin into an interface!

That is when we decided to focus more on how the touch of a hand can comfort a person with distress. We decided to go with the face as the primary receptor for the sensation of touch. Facial touch by others is generally regarded as an action backed by strong emotion. For warmth as a means of comfort, we could recreate the sense of endearment and belonging. Our hypothesis was that the prototype would help users calm down and reduce sensory overload. We decided to combine multiple ideas after having our tutorial. To create the feeling of comfort we decided to go with a pair of clay hands encased in blue latex gloves. Latex is a good substitute for the texture of skin but we were unable to recreate the warmth and comfort that the body heat gives. For this, we used gel warmers and put them inside the gloves so that the user would feel the warmth of the gel warmers as well.

Creating fake anatomically accurate hands was not as easy as it sounds

However we still felt that we could represent skin a little better than this. One of our final ideas included presenting skin in a different medium — food. We baked a lasagna that would have all of the layers of skin represented in it.

Skin represented through food as a medium — as lasagna

Therefore we went into our interim presentation with two different ideas to present and our demonstration received mixed feedback.

Our classmates appreciated the fake hands with the heated gel warmers

Takeaways: Interim presentations are just that. Interim. Stay the course and know there is always room for improvement.