The study of tactile feeling and It's expressing vocabulary

• We classified all tactile feeling related vocabularies into categories.
• We found the difference of tactile feeling vocabulary between blind and blindfolded individuals.
• We summarized correspondence between materials and tactile feeling vocabulary.
• The function and meaning of tactile between blind and blindfolded individuals are not similar.
• By modifying the specific physical feature of materials designers may control their tactile feeling and image to people.

Tactile feeling is an important sense of people's use of products in our daily life. However, how people express and verbalize their tactile feeling has hardly been systematically studied. Thus, the purpose of this study is to investigate how people describe their tactile feeling and how this expression will be affected by visual experience. To achieve the purpose a focus interview was conducted for this study. A set of 51 samples of various textures based on a literature review and a pilot study was prepared as reference stimuli in the interview to evoke respondents' tactile feeling and experience. Six blind and 5 blindfolded respondents were recruited for the interview. In each interview session the respondent was guided and encouraged by the interviewer to exhaustively describe his/her tactile feeling on freely touching the reference samples only, without the aid of vision. The Kawakita Jiro method (KJ method) then was used to sort, classify and analyze the collected vocabularies of tactile feeling. The results showed that the expressed vocabularies of tactile feeling can be classified into five dimensions: “objective/measurable”, “evaluative/aesthetic”, “social status and positions”, “emotional” and “interface quality”. Among them, vocabularies of “objective/measurable” and “interface quality” were the most frequently mentioned by respondents, while those of the “evaluative/aesthetic” were the least. The expressed vocabularies between the blind and the blindfolded respondents were also found to be significantly different in the five dimensions.Relevance to industryThe results of this study can help researchers to further understanding tactile feeling and help designers in selecting appropriate vocabularies of tactile feeling to express in their product designs.

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