Light Touch Matters is an EU FP7-funded project that brings together product designers and material researchers from 9 countries and 17 different organisations to develop a new generation of affordable materials and products that respond to touch with light.

The team of designers and materials researchers will be working together to combine flexible piezoelectric polymers and organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) in a variety of ways, with end products combining touch sensitivity with luminosity.

New polymeric piezo and OLED stacks are being developed that will be both flexible and formable, and can therefore be seamlessly integrated into products, resulting in entire objects that respond to their user. The consortium will be applying these novel ‘light touch’ materials in care and well-being applications. As well as developing new materials and novel uses for them, this project also develops new methodologies to help designers and materials scientists work together successfully.