A-Lab Performed (A = aesthetic) is an exploratory method that builds upon the original A-Lab method developed by Akner Koler (Akner Koler and Ranjbar 2016). The original A-Lab method enables participants to share their aesthetic experiences of a phenomenon—such as time and temporality, nanotechnology, or vibrotactile technology—from an individual, emotional perspective within a playful setting. A-Lab Performed expands on this by guiding participants to compose and perform their experiences, adding a performative and expressive dimension to the process.

Interest in haptic perception is growing within the food design community due to the expanding knowledge of multi-sensory experiences across the design spectrum. Our aim was to investigate how haptic perception can be explored, defined and illustrated by interweaving our professional experiences and methods that reflect creative strategies from our aesthetic disciplines: industrial design, culinary arts and hospitality. We developed and conducted a series of practice-based research methods starting with three playful ‘aesthetic labs’ (A-labs), followed by the ‘five basic features-method’ (FBF). This resulted in unfolding four distinct ‘haptic attribute models’: the first three are designed for the ‘hand’, ‘mouth’ and ‘nose’ with the gestalt intention to ‘make’, and the fourth model is designed to guide an ‘embodied presence’ session to facilitate ‘awareness’. The configuration and definition of attributes in each model relate to each author’s professional experiences and emotions, which strengthen the connection between our respective aesthetic disciplines. The models serve as creative instruments to inspire a hybrid food design community for food and non-food applications and support practitioners, educators and researchers interested in haptics. We are dedicated to prototype new haptic attribute models to support research in haptics that are rooted in professional subjective experiences and facilitate ways of connecting disciplines within and beyond the field of aesthetics. We invite readers to share insights gained from applying these models to further their development and relevance.

We experience an urgent climate crisis that shakes our whole existence and calls for change. The field of industrial design education has expanded over the past decades towards a new language of speculative design projects, aiming to influence industry and address unsustainable manufacturing. How designers typically use their capacities for change, is shown in the discursive qualities of proposed solutions. Within the current educational context, not given a commercial brief, new methods arise. This international design master's course aims to find better future product concepts that nudge sustainable ways of living. How they initiate and prototype these product ideas, is through design fiction and co-creation, conceptualizing and proposing solutions to essential problems and needs. By the use of prototypes, designers can bring essential future solutions into the present. This paper outlines how the new ‘Anticipative Co-creation Method’ emerged. As the foresighted concepts intend to address the negative trends in overconsumption and unsustainable lifestyle, the designs for the far future function as inspirational future versions of the relevant suggestions for today. Through interpersonal anticipatory engagement, concepts grow out of the design fiction. In a dialog with each other students verbalize scenarios and through co-creation concepts become ‘real’ as different videos were created. We have observed that the students build empathy for each other through co-creative activities within the method of anticipation. If we want a thriving future, we need to act now. The design profession has never been more essential in building and critically assessing design futures literacies. 

The intention of this research is to investigate how interaction designers may explore felt time through the culinary practice of sourdough baking. In this exposition we share how the physical experience and manipulation/shaping of time in sourdough baking provides an experience of fulfillment and satisfaction. We show our insights on how interaction designers, and possibly many other communities of practice and discourse, may learn from this.

The goal is to inspire the audience to engage in a broad and critical discourse around felt time and to emphasize the value of prototyping a felt time repertoire in interaction design. The research exploration is built on the collaboration between an interaction designer/researcher, a culinary connoisseur baker and a sculptor/design researcher and teacher.

Our topic concerns how to conduct practice-based research between and within three aesthetic disciplines: sculptor, professional taster, and performative artist. We continue to work with the material and experiences developed during the 3-year VR-funded HAPTICA research project. Our plan is to actualise a few practical situations that show how we gained both a deeper aesthetic knowledge within our own artistic disciplines and grew more sensitive and knowledgeable about the challenges faced in the other disciplines. The overall topic has been to expand the field of aesthetics by including the proximity senses: tactile, haptic, smell, taste, and movement by conducting artistic research in haptic.

Haptica is an artistic research project in the field of aesthetics that explores practical and theoretical connections between haptic attributes of the hand (making), nose, mouth and throat (tasting) and body (inner presence). The project aims to interlace aesthetic reasoning from sculpture and design to culinary art that emphasises active exploration and intentional form- and taste- giving processes. Haptic perception engages sensory experiences mediated through skin and kinaesthetic system.

The project started with researching how air flows through space and is perceived by subtle sensory receptors under our skin and hair follicles, proceeding to tactile touch of material and grasping of material and instruments used in the creative making and performative process. It then shifted the practical and theoretical models from external space and physical materials to internal airflow through breathing, smelling and tasting that connects with soma aesthetics and reflection through inner presence. The project is a collaboration with Mischa Billing and Annika Göran Rodell, Campus Grythyttan at the School of Hospitality, Culinary Arts and Meal Science, Örebro University.

There are approx. 1300 people with deafblindnes (DB) in Sweden where about 100 of them are with complete deafness (D) and blindness (B). The number will reach about 30000 if we also include people older than 65 with severe visual impairment (VI) and hearing impairment (HI) and several million worldwide.  Difficulties in time perception, environmental perception, music perception, mobility, social participation and communication are examples of their frequent problems. Five haptic technical aids are developed to reduce these problems. Distime is an application in a smart phone to inform the user about the planned activities by choosing different information channel depending on the sense that works and her/his ability. The activities can be presented as sound or vibrations for users with B; as images, movies and also as vibrations for those with D and vibrations for those with DB. Monitor informs users with D and DB about ongoing events with the aim to increase their environmental perception. Using an specific algorithm for environmental sounds, it converts the audible sounds produced by events to sensible vibrations which can be sensed and interpreted as events. Good Vibrations uses an specific algorithm for music and converts the audible music to vibrations which can be felt with the aim to increase music perception for users with severe HI, D/DB as well as for users with normal hearing who want extra enhanced experience of the music. Ready-Ride is a positioning and communication aid to improve the mobility of riders with severe VI, B or DB. It is used for distance communication between a trainer and a rider with VI where the trainer can send information about the rider’s position give commands or feedback about the riding. VibroBraille informs users with B/DB about the short notifications received from different applications in her/his cell phone. It converts the text to its corresponding Braille pattern where the active points are vibrating.

Morse code has been used as a communications system at a distance to transmit text through tone or light pulses. This comparative study aims to test and evaluate the vibrotactile identification of Morse coded signals communicating instructions for movement. The pulses were presented on abdomen and wrist among 14 males (40-85 yr) experienced in acoustic Morse code and the rate of pulses was 12 words per minute using a Vibration Motor mounted in a plastic holder. There identification results were statistically significantly better on wrist compared to abdomen. Words were identified significantly better on the wrist as compared to abdomen but the identification results of the letters were equally good in both placements. There was a negative correlation between age and the pooled identification results tested on wrist PCC r=-0.45 (p<0.02). The participants rank ordered the wrist, over the abdomen, as the best place for positioning the vibrator. The results support haptic/tactile interaction research in positioning and communication system. Our future plans are to apply the results to the project "Ready Ride" for instructions for horseback riding for people with deafblindness as well as activity and movement for elderly people with impaired vision and hearing.