Tactility Trialing: Exploring Materials to Inform Tactile Experience Design

Although materials of tangible interaction designs largely determine their user experience, material choices are often steered by practical motives. This paper presents ‘tactility trialing’, an approach to explore tactile experiences of materials to inform the design of tangible artifacts. Through experience formulation, material selection, artifact creation and short user studies, designers and design-researchers are enabled to make informed decisions on the materials to be used in order to evoke the intended experience. The approach is illustrated through two case studies of student work. Tactility trialing helped them in getting acquainted with tactile material qualities in practice, and with the applicability of material characteristics such as resilience and hardness in design