Material-Touch-Emotions: an approach to understanding and categorising textile materials based on emotional responses to touch

This PhD research examined the interconnection between materials, touch, and emotion, to address the research question: How can textile materials be categorised based on emotional responses to touch? While there is extensive research in understanding a textile material’s physical properties from a textile engineering perspective, the emotional response of touching a textile material is less defined, understood and researched. For textile designers, working in areas such as wellbeing and emotional durability to extend the product’s life, understanding of the interconnection between materials, touch, and emotion is critical. With the shift from product-oriented design approaches to life-centred design approaches, there is a need to understand the process of material interaction from the user experience perspective and consequently support a more empathic design process. To address the research question, the research was designed as two phases and drew together a range of research methods. The first phase provided the contextual review of literature related to touch, materials, and emotion from the fields of design, textile materials and psychology. These were then brought together and positioned within the field of textile design. This led to identifying the research gaps and establishing the research objectives: firstly, there is no consistent language to articulate emotional responses to the active touch of textile materials; secondly, there are no tools to support the understanding of the connection between emotional responses and the active touch of textile materials; thirdly, there is no approach for textile material categorisation based on emotional responses to the touch of textile materials. The second phase addressed these research gaps through three projects. Built upon previous works and drawing on methods from the disciplines of psychology, design and materials science, selected materials were presented to users to touch while hidden from their view. The collection of materials was loosely categorised into sensorial groups with bipolar attributes of smooth vs. rough, dry vs. sticky, warm vs. cold and soft vs. hard. Project 1 led to the development of the Material-Touch-Emotion (MaTE) Lexicon, a language for expressing the emotional responses to the active touch of textile materials. Project 2 developed the SensAE Tool and the MaTE Model to understand the connection between emotional responses and the active touch of textile materials. Project 3 proposed an approach for understanding and categorising textile materials based on emotional responses. The proposed approach involved the use of the MaTE Lexicon and SensAE Tool, to guide someone through how to prompt an emotional response to the touch of a textile material. This consisted of: (1) testing a set of textile materials using the Kawabata Evaluation System for Fabrics (KES-F), (2) conducting a user test to evaluate the emotional responses of touching the same set of materials, and then (3) comparing the results of part (1) and (2) to understand the relationship between the physical experience (what the textile material feels like) and the psychological experience of material-touch (what the user feels when touching the textile material). The key contributions of this research are a set of tools (the MaTE Model, SensAE Tool and MaTE Lexicon) and a proposed approach for understanding and categorising textile materials based on emotional responses to touch. Together the proposed approach and associated tools provide a starting point for understanding how to categorise textile materials based on emotional response to touch, by guiding someone through the steps towards being able to recognise and articulate their own emotional responses. The intention is to stimulate awareness, reflection, and discussion on material selection that can be customised to fit individual needs (for example product area and user group) and thus enable more informed material choices. Considering material choices connected to touch and emotion supports designers to strengthen and create attachment. With this in mind, it is intended that the proposed method and tools would be made available through an accessible platform in the form of a flexible open-source toolkit – the Textile MaTE Toolkit – to support designers to better understand and consider the emotional responses of touching different materials.<p></p>