“Touch hunger” describes the innate desire for healthy human touch. While this need has been studied in historically extreme situations such as solitary confinement in prisons and failure to thrive in orphaned infants, it is rarely discussed in the context of healthy adulthood. Often misunderstood as sexual desire, touch hunger merely describes the need for skin-to-skin interaction with other humans. Deficiencies from this lack of human physical contact are known to cause serious malformations both mentally and physically. In extreme cases individuals have increased predispositions for depression and other anxiety- associated mental illness, difficulty with empathy and forming long- lasting relationships, decreased embodied cognition, and increased likelihood of stunted physical development and illness (Montagu, 1986).

In the past decade, as technological communication has increasingly dominated social interaction and instances of loneliness, depression, and workplace disengagement in North America have begun to rise, touch hunger has slowly entered the conversation as a possible contributing factor. In 2010, 40-45% of working age Americans reported feelings of chronic loneliness, a nearly 30% increase from 1980 (Khullar, 2017). While a single cause for this rise is impossible to identify given the complexities of modern life, touch hunger offers a holistic mental and physical perspective that starts with the human body.

Being in Touch: Design Tools for Navigating Our Innate Human Needs in the Modern Workplace is a methodological toolset for innovative thinkers working in design and technology to understand their innate needs and gain skills to shape a future without touch hunger. Derived from design thinking, somatic theory, and improvisational games, it places the innate needs of the human body at the forefront of the conversation. Being in Touch serves as a framework for designers and technologists to understand these needs through workshops in safe and structured moments of exploration while pushing themselves to engage in dynamic creative thinking through body innovation.