New design methods for educating designers are needed to adapt the attributes of haptic interaction to fit the embodied experience of the users. This paper presents educationally framed aesthetic sensitizing labs: 1) a material-lab exploring the tactile and haptic structures of materials, 2) a vibrotactile-lab exploring actuators directly on the body and 3) a combined materials- and vibrotactile-lab embedded in materials. These labs were integrated in a design course that supports a non-linear design process for embodied explorative and experimental activities that feed into an emerging gestalt. A co-design process was developed in collaboration with researchers and users who developed positioning and communications systems for people with deafblindness. Conclusion: the labs helped to discern attributes of haptic interactions which supported designing scenarios and prototypes showing novel ways to understand and shape haptic interaction.

The authors use new aesthetic criteria concerning structures and properties to explain parallel concepts within theoretical astroparticle physics and contemporary form/compositional research. These aesthetic criteria stem from complex curvature models developed both in string theory and in artistic perceptual research on transitional surfaces and concavities. The authors compare the complex curvatures of the mathematically derived Calabi-Yau manifold with one of Akner Koler's sculptures, which explores an organic interpretation of the looping curvature of a Möbius strip. A goal of the collaboration is to gain experience and insight into the twisting paradoxical forces in the 3D world and to explore the properties of transparency as applied to the Calabi-Yau manifold and a point cloud translation of Akner Koler's sculpture.