Tactile Aesthetics of Materials and Design

During the user-product interaction process, tactile feeling of materials plays a vital role. This chapter starts from understanding the essence of texture beyond the visual domain, explores the perception dimensions of material textures via the sense of touch, i.e., geometrical dimension, physical-chemical dimension, emotional dimension and associative dimension. The concept and method of optimum texture design will be discussed, where the correlations between the perception dimensions and the relationships between subjective feelings and underlying physical properties or parameters of materials are brought to attention. To bring the findings of the research into practical application within design projects, a material-aesthetics database has been developed.