Digital Touch Ethics and Values (original) (raw)

This chapter examines key ethical considerations and challenges of designing and researching touch technologies, with a focus on incorporating ethical touch sensitivities and values into digital touch communication. We discuss the difficulty of researching and designing ethically in the context of an emerging technological landscape, as reflected in wider HCI ethics debate. The chapter then explores the central role of the human body as site for digital touch communication, before focusing on key challenges around trust, control, consent, and tactile data. In line with preceding chapters, we argue that digital touch practices are part of, and impact on, wider social relations and communications. The kinds of touch practices and relations designed into touch technologies bring with them implications for power relations and social cohesion, and it is these wider processes that digital touch design is able to-at least in parts-anticipate and shape. We close with a summary of key points and their implications for research and design.