Touch and design (T´ND) a European funded project

Gestures, besides speech, represent the mostly used means of expression by humans. For that regards the product design field, designers have multiple ways for communicating their ideas and concepts. One of them concerns the model making activity, where designers make explicit their concepts by using some appropriate tools and specific hand movements on plastic material with the intent of obtaining a shape. Some studies have demonstrated that visual, tactile and kinesthetic feedbacks are equally important in the shape creation and evaluation process. Moreover current computer aided tools aimed at supporting the conceptual phase of product design are not intuitive to use, and do not exploit designers\´ skill and creativity. This paper presents the results of a research work aiming at integrating user-friendly and effective ways of interaction based on ad-hoc haptic interfaces into free-form shape modeling systems. The European project "Touch and Design" (T\´nD) proposes the implementation of an innovative virtual clay modeling system based on novel haptic interaction modality oriented to industrial designers. In order to develop an intuitive and easy-to-use system, a study of designers\´ hand modeling activities has been carried out by the project industrial partners supported by cognitive psychologists. The users\´ manual operators and tools have been translated into corresponding haptic tools and multimodal interaction modalities in the virtual free-form shape modeling system. The paper presents the project research activities, the results achieved so far and the future related work