This article explores how eighteenth-century shoppers understood the material world around them. It argues that retail experiences exposed shoppers to different objects, which subsequently shaped their understanding of this world. This article builds on recent research that highlights the importance of shop environments and browsing in consumer choice. More particularly, it differentiates itself by examining the practice of handling goods in shops and arguing that sensory interaction with multiple goods was one of the key means by which shoppers comprehended concepts of design and workmanship. In doing so, it affirms the importance of sensory research to design history.The article focuses on consumer purchases of ceramic objects and examines a variety of sources to demonstrate the role of haptic skills in this act. It shows how different literary sources described browsing for goods in gendered and satirical terms and then contrasts these readings against visual evidence to illustrate how handling goods was also represented as a positive act. It reads browsing as a valued practice requiring competence, patience and haptic skills. Through an examination of diary sources, letters and objects this article asks what information shoppers gained from touching various objects. It concludes by demonstrating how repetitive handling in search of quality meant that shoppers acquired their own conception of what constituted workmanship and design.
In Geographical Information Systems, spatial point pattern data are often analysed by dividing space into pixels, recording the presence or absence of points in each pixel, and fitting a logistic regression. We study weaknesses of this approach, propose improvements, and demonstrate an applicatio...
When a finger moves to scan the surface of an object (haptic sensing), the sliding contact generates vibrations that propagate in the finger skin activating the receptors (mechanoreceptors) located in the skin, allowing the brain to identify objects and perceive information about their properties...
We report on recent work in modelling the process of grasping and active touch by natural and artificial hands. Starting from observations made in human hands about the correlation of degrees of freedom in patterns of more frequent use (postural synergies), we consider the implications of a geome...
Microcantilever sensors have been known as a fundamental design used in force sensors, strain sensors and biochemical sensors. The fast-growing applications in nanoelectromechanical systems (NEMS) lead to strong demands in new sensing mechanism in order to downsize the sensing elements to nanomet...
Some industrial areas as oil, automotive and aerospace industries, require electromechanical systems working in harsh environments. An elegant solution is to use III-V materials alloys having semiconductor, piezoelectric and pyroelectric properties. These materials, particularly nitrides such as ...
We present an advanced RMS voltage sensor based on a variable parallel-plate capacitor using the principle of electrostatic force. The device is fabricated in a micromechanical surface process with a high-aspect ratio actuator, reinforced by copper electroplating employing a sacrificial photo-res...
Cognitive Radio (CR) technology enables the opportunistic use of the portions of the licensed spectrum by the CR users, while ensuring low interference to the primary user (PU) activity in the licensed bands. The spectrum is sensed locally by the CR users, and a specific channel that is acceptabl...
An objective and systematic method for large-scale planting design was previously published. It involved multiple regression equations relating species abundance to topo-edaphic variables in a native (model) plant community, calculated from survey data collected by forestry departments. The metho...
A distributed, self-organization algorithm for ground target tracking using unattended acoustic sensor network is developed. Instead of using microphone arrays, each sensor node in the sensor network uses only a single microphone as its sensing device. This design can greatly reduce the size and ...
Heathlands are man-made habitats and their decline during the last century can be contributed to shifts in both agricultural and management practices as well as to hydrological and atmospheric changes. As a result, many heathland sites, including the Kalmthoutse Heide in Belgium, were included in...
