Long-distance relationships (LDRs) struggle to sustain intimacy without physical touch. Existing mediated social touch systems rely on designer-authored haptic patterns, which limit opportunities for personalization and shared meaning-making. We present Onni, a haptic interface that lets couples collaboratively define and experience a shared library of haptic interactions. In Study 1, we conducted co-creation workshops (n=20) to examine how couples negotiate and align meanings in haptic interactions. In Study 2, we deployed Onni in everyday routines (n=6) to explore how these interactions are adopted, adapted, and ritualized. Our findings illustrate that couples co-create and personalize haptic interactions through continuous exploration, negotiation, and situational adaptation. By integrating a dyadic co-design approach, an end-user authoring interface for a shared action–feedback haptic repertoire, and a longitudinal view of how meanings evolve in everyday LDR routines, this work advances understanding of haptic meaning-making as a collaboratively constructed and ritualized process. It offers concrete design implications for building personalized, evolving haptic systems that support intimacy in LDRs.
ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems