"Our Secret Language": Co-Creating and Ritualizing Affective Haptics in Long-Distance Relationships

Paper Title

'Our Secret Language': Co-Creating and Ritualizing Affective Haptics in Long-Distance Relationships

Publication Info

• Topic area: Affective haptics for intimacy in long-distance relationships
• Keywords: Long-distance relationships, mediated social touch, haptic interaction, co-creation, rituals, intimacy, personalization, affective computing, user-centered design, tangible interfaces

Background and Problem

• Problem / challenge: Existing mediated social touch systems rely on designer-defined haptic patterns, limiting personalization, shared meaning-making, and integration into relational routines.
• Significance: Physical touch is critical for intimacy and emotional regulation in relationships, but it is absent in long-distance relationships (LDRs). Addressing this gap can enhance emotional connection and relational satisfaction.
• Motivation and related work: Prior work on mediated social touch has focused on transmitting predefined signals, often neglecting the co-creation of personalized haptic semantics and their evolution into rituals. This paper builds on the need for participatory, context-sensitive haptic systems that support intimacy through shared practices.

Solution

• Proposed approach: Onni, a haptic interface enabling long-distance couples to co-create, personalize, and ritualize a shared library of haptic interactions.
• Novelty:
  1. Introduction of a longitudinal co-design framework combining workshops and in-the-wild deployment.
  2. Reframing affective haptics as a negotiated, ritualized process rather than fixed signal transmission.
  3. Development of a closed-loop, user-authored interaction design system for bidirectional action-feedback mappings.
  4. Identification of mechanisms by which co-created gestures stabilize into rituals.
• Procedure and key techniques:
  1. Conducted co-creation workshops (n=20) to explore how couples design and align haptic semantics.
  2. Deployed Onni in real-world routines (n=6) to study adoption, adaptation, and ritualization.
  3. Iteratively developed Onni through five prototypes, culminating in a deployable toolkit with gesture sensing, haptic actuation, and breathing simulation.
  4. Analyzed data through thematic analysis of interviews, design artifacts, and interaction logs.

Results

• Concrete findings:
  • Couples co-created 30 shared gestures in workshops, with emotional support gestures dominating (e.g., bedtime and comfort scenarios).
  • In deployment, gestures were ritualized through shared ownership, contextual anchoring, iterative refinement, and felt togetherness.
  • Average usage was 12.2 gestures per person per day, with patterns stabilizing into routines like bedtime rituals.
• Advantage over baselines: Onni enabled couples to co-create personalized haptic interactions, unlike prior systems with fixed designer-defined signals. This approach fostered emotional resonance and routine integration.
• Experiments / evaluation:
  • Study 1: Co-creation workshops with 10 couples (n=20) to design and align haptic gestures.
  • Study 2: Deployment with 3 couples (n=6) over 7 days to observe adoption and ritualization in daily life.
  • Metrics: Gesture usage frequency, qualitative insights from interviews, and design evolution records.
• Limitations and future work:
  • Small sample size in deployment study (n=6).
  • Limited cultural and demographic diversity (all participants were young, educated, and Chinese).
  • Fixed device form factor may have constrained design possibilities.
  • Short deployment duration (7 days).
  • Future work should include larger, more diverse samples, cross-cultural studies, and co-design of device form factors.

Summary

This paper introduces Onni, a haptic interface enabling long-distance couples to co-create and ritualize personalized haptic interactions. Through workshops and real-world deployment, the study demonstrates how couples negotiate and stabilize shared haptic semantics, transforming them into meaningful rituals. Findings highlight the importance of co-authorship, contextual anchoring, and iterative refinement in fostering intimacy through touch. The work contributes to the design of affective haptic systems by emphasizing user-shaped semantics over fixed signal sets and offers implications for designing personalized, evolving haptic technologies for various relational contexts.