Touch stories: engaging with the intimacy of materials through touch

The authors argue that TOUCH is an essential ingredient for intimate engagement with the materials. Touch is about direct contact, close and personal. Through this intimacy, the designer can fully understand the potential sensory impact on their customers and can share their knowledge of this intimacy with the customers. This is a way to better, more sustainable products. How to ensure that entrepreneurs use the full potential of Touch? The paper describes first experiments with a multidisciplinary, multinational fashion student community - the designers and business professionals of the future. In general, this community embraced touch as a vehicle to inspire and stimulate our senses that could in principle lead to the creation of touch concepts and new products. This is the start of a journey that is using sequential projects and storytelling as tools, a research journey we intend to take well beyond fashion