Sensory interaction with materials

The visual aesthetics of a particular material and the surface texture information are signalled through visual and tactile feedback. This will contribute to how the user perceives the ‘material representation’. There is little evidence to suggest that a wealth of information exists about the sensory and aesthetic characteristics of materials. This research is concerned with people’s perception of the inherent and perceived properties of materials within a holistic environment and system, which is referred to as ‘material representation’. It is defined as “the perceived images, properties, meanings, and values of a material in the human-product interface under a specific set of environmental conditions” (Zuo et al., 2001). It emphasises the sensory interaction between materials and their users. Because of various variables, a visual narrative matrix is being developed to systematically explore material representation. Both the theoretical study and the experimental findings are needed for construction of the matrix. The results of our previous research have made it possible to identify the way in which people subjectively describe a material texture through touch. Subjective texture description of materials has been classified into four dimensions: geometrical dimension, physical-chemical dimension, emotional dimension, and associative dimension. Each dimension consists of a primary and a secondary group of lexicons (Zuo et al., 2001). This paper details some experimental results about people’s scaled sensory responses to materials’ texture by touch and the correlations between these responses have been investigated.