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Surjyatapa Ray Choudhury
TOUCH: senses to form
Obuchi Lab | The University of Tokyo
Studio research project
2018
Surjyatapa Ray, Boon Hau Lim, Pyaezone Aungsoe
Julie Malloy, 33, from York, Pennsylvania, tells what it’s like to live without the sense of touch:
“I was born with a rare sensory illness that leaves me unable to feel pain, temperature, deep pressure, or vibrations in my arms, legs, and the majority of my chest and back. I use vision to compensate as much as I can—when I stand, I always watch my feet so I don’t lose my balance. I always wash my face with cold water; I once burned myself without realizing it."
Touch: the most ubiquitous of human senses, yet the most overlooked. Could you imagine losing your sense of touch? How often do we perceive the presence of this sense manifesting in our behavior, and the way we react to things?
This project explores the sense of touch through three mediums: temperature, shape, and texture. Unique reactions to these mediums render in the final form of a lantern. Experiments involving heating a unique shaped object, in this case a tetrahedron, and recording the holding and placing method of participants were recorded and used to create a modular pattern, which gave rise to the final lantern form.
Project Details
While humans can perceive touch in several parts of the body, the fingertips form one of the most sensitive areas with 3000 touch receptors. Our experiments with touch uses this fact to extract touch reactions to objects heated beyond 45 degree celsius, which is the human threshold to pain.
The experiments found an intersection between temperature and geomtery in order to derive distinctive visual connection between touch and temperature in the final output. Tests were done with cubes, cylinders and tetrahedrons, with the tetrahedron displaying the largest variety of holding methods.
In order to prevail a real-time reaction touching a heated object, holding it and placing it, magnets were used between two elements. A digital twin of the tetrahedrons being placed were anlaysed for shear strength, to test which module would be structurally feasible.
While humans can perceive touch in several parts of the body, the fingertips form one of the most sensitive areas with 3000 touch receptors. Our experiments with touch uses this fact to extract touch reactions to objects heated beyond 45 degree celsius, which is the human threshold to pain.
The fabrication workflow involved recording the unique placement of tetrahedron units of each participant, and creating a digital twin to analyse stability. The structural analysis was testing using shear strength between two units, attached with magnets. A final array of stable modules were selected and simulated to generate the final lantern form.
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