Feel–Play–Imagine: Structured introduction and imagination of haptics with storytellers

Haptic technology offers new opportunities for interaction, yet remains inaccessible to people unfamiliar with the technology due to challenges in rapid prototyping and the absence of a widely understood vocabulary, making early-stage design communication difficult. To address these challenges, we developed Feel–Play–Imagine (FPI), a method for haptics experts to involve team members and stakeholders in the early stages of design, and explored its use in the context of storytelling. FPI involves introducing people to haptics through experiencing polished haptic experiences in context (Feel) and experimenting with alternative modalities (Play), then engaging in discussions using stories to imagine designed experiences (Imagine). We report on the results of using FPI in an ongoing co-design project and a lab study with 10 expert storytellers from various backgrounds. Our findings include the value of hands-on and playful experiences to learn about haptic technologies, the ability of FPI to support design decisions, the ability of our developed Worksheet to structure discussion in some contexts, and the need to support multimodal and gestural communication when discussing haptic and tangible interaction.