| 1. |
- La Delfa, Joseph, 1990-, et al.
(författare)
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Are Drones Meditative?
- 2019
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Ingår i: Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. - New York, NY, USA : Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).
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Konferensbidrag (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Meditative movement involves regulating attention to the body whilst moving, to create a state of meditation. This can be difficult for beginners, we propose that drones can facilitate this as they can move with and give feedback to whole body movements. We present a demonstration that explores various ways drones could facilitate meditative movement by drawing attention to the body. We designed a two-handed control map for the drone that engages multiple parts of the body, a light foam casing to give the impression that the drone is floating and an onboard light which gives feedback to the speed of the movement. The user will experience both leading and following the drone to explore the interplay between mapping, form, feedback and instruction. The demonstration relates to an expansion of the attention regulation framework, which is used to inform the design of interactive meditative experiences and human-drone interactions.
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| 2. |
- La Delfa, Joseph, 1990-
(författare)
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Cultivating Mechanical Sympathy : Making meaning with ambiguous machines
- 2023
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Moving with a drone can be a captivating and reflective experience. A drone can easily grab my attention, yet its hold is distinctly different to a screen where my body goes missing and my eyes are held captive. Instead, my body feels alive and present. As if every part of it is playing a crucial role in keeping the drone in the air. The sensors on my body enable the drone to be sensitive to my movements, which in turn increases my sensitivity to the drone's movements. It's like carrying a cup of hot tea with a book under your arm, any sudden movement from any part of your body affects the tea in the cup and vice versa.In this thesis, I traced back through this experience and several other first-person experiences with machines to reflect on their constituent moments of sensing and acting. In doing so, I came to realise that these moments were fundamental to making meaning with machines, that is, how you come to understand its function and its purpose in your daily life. I used a combination of soma design and industrial design practice to draw from these first-person experiences and create three systems, Tai Chi in the Clouds, Drone Chi and How to Train Your Drone. Through the design of the first two systems, I attempted to distil the feeling of being a beginner tai chi student into a human-drone interaction. Subsequent user studies of these two systems demonstrated some degree of success, but it was the participants' own interpretations that sparked my curiosity and drove the creative process for the third system. I was fascinated by the tendency for participants to liken unfamiliar feelings to past experiences when faced with an ambiguous situation with a drone. This prompted me to reflect on the ambiguity that presented itself to me during the design process of Tai Chi in the Clouds and Drone Chi. There I found rich associations with my past experience racing go-karts and maintaining old cars. This culminated in the design of How to Train Your Drone, a more ambiguous human-drone interaction intended to support the participants’ own interpretations and allow their unique constellation of sensing and acting to drive the meaning making process.The subsequent analysis of a month-long user study led me to describe the unique and tacit relationship that unfolds between a human and a drone as Mechanical Sympathy. Mechanical Sympathy is a process of sensing and acting that leads to a cumulative appreciation ofhuman-with-machine. It does not, in the reductive sense, mean being emotionally sympathetic towards a machine, but rather a synergy or bodily understanding between human and machine that shapes how they can act together. This process entails fostering an awareness of your capabilities, limitations, and changing body in relation to a machine and vice versa. It also allows you to craft your own experiences with a machine and explore how that machine, in turn, shapes your aesthetic preferences. Through this process, you can reflect on what kinds of human-machine experiences hold value and meaning.Whilst analysing the interview data from How to Train Your Drone it became clear to me that the participants did not program the drones to perform some action as much as they shaped what the drone could and could not sense; how reality was presented to the drone. This was an important shift in perspective that led me to propose an expansion of the soma design program that considers designing interactive technology as less of a material to be mastered and more of an agent to evolve with — both for the designer and later for users. Central to this shift was the concept of the Umwelt, first introduced by Jakob von Uexküll which posits that we cannot know what it is like to be anything but human and therefore the realities of other beings are essentially unknowable. However, we can make meaning with them by paying attention, which, fittingly, is something that is required by both the soma design process and its resulting artefacts. Additionally, I looked to the fields of evolutionary robotics and human-robot interaction to bring structure to this expanded soma design program and situate it in the literature. Ultimately, I aimed to afford both the designer and the user novel ways to embrace ambiguity when interacting with machines by providing opportunities for aesthetic appreciation and meaning making. The thesis concludes with a speculative look at the challenges this approach to design faces in the context of daily life.
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| 3. |
- La Delfa, Joseph, 1990-, et al.
(författare)
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Designing drone chi: Unpacking the thinking and making of somaesthetic human-drone interaction
- 2020
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Ingår i: DIS 2020 - Proceedings of the 2020 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference. - New York, NY, USA : ACM. ; , s. 575-586
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- Drone Chi is a Tai Chi inspired human-drone interaction experience. As a design research project, situated within somaesthetic interaction design, where a central topic is cultivating bodily and sensory appreciation to improve one's quality of life. Drone Chi investigates the potential of autonomous micro-quadcopters as a design material for somaesthetic HCI. Through a quasi-chronological account of the design process, this pictorial articulates how the sensory experiences of Tai Chi were integrated into Drone Chi. Taking a slow and open-ended design research approach, we iteratively developed the project through somaesthetic, product design and engineering perspectives and drew heavily on design analogies and imagery for inspiration. This elevated the influence of the soma amongst narrow engineering parameters and usability requirements. This pictorial serves as a reflective resource for designers who are experimenting with merging their native discipline with someasthetic interaction design.
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| 4. |
- La Delfa, Joseph, 1990-, et al.
(författare)
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Drone Chi : Somaesthetic Human-Drone Interaction
- 2020
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Ingår i: Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. - New York, NY, USA : Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- Somaesthetics—motivated by improving life quality via appreciation for bodily and sensory experiences—is increasingly influencing HCI designs. Investigating the potential of drones as a material for somaesthetic HCI, we designed Drone Chi: a Tai Chi-inspired close-range human-drone interaction experience. The design process for Drone Chi has been informed by the soma design approach and the Somaesthetic Appreciation concept from HCI literature. The artifact expands somaesthetic HCI by exemplifying dynamic and intimate somaesthetic interactions with a robotic design material, and body movements in expansive 3D space. To characterize the Drone Chi experience, we conducted an empirical study with 32 participants. Analysis of participant accounts revealed 4 themes that articulate different aspects of the experience: Looping Mental States, Environment, Agency vs. Control, and Physical Narratives. From these accounts and our craft knowledge, we derive 5 design implications to guide the development of movement-based close-range drone interactions.
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| 5. |
- La Delfa, Joseph, 1990-, et al.
(författare)
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How to Train Your Drone : Defining and Designing for Mechanical Sympathy
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Annan publikation (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- How to Train your Drone is a research product designed to inspire experiences of mechanical sympathy; the reflective process of cultivating nuanced, somaesthetic appreciation of a machine. This fosters a bodily understanding or synergy between human and machine that shapes how they act together. We develop mechanical sympathy through the lenses of (i) somatic sensitization and responsivity to capabilities and limitations, (ii) appreciation of changes, (iii) joint agency, and (iv) cultivation toward aesthetic pursuits. Through designing and deploying this system, we present three stories of cultivating mechanical sympathy. We unpack these stories to reveal how oscillation – the alternation between different movements, perspectives, and familiarities – informed both sense- and meaning-making with the system. Finally, we discuss how each participant came to reflect on value and meaningfulness in their interactions and argue that mechanical sympathy can inform how we make space for meaningfulness-making in human-machine relations.
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| 6. |
- La Delfa, Joseph, 1990-, et al.
(författare)
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Tai Chi In The Clouds : Using Micro UAVs To Support Tai Chi Practice
- 2018
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Ingår i: CHI PLAY 2018. - New York, NY, USA : Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- Tai Chi uses smooth movement and a focussed state of mind to support mental and physical health. Tai Chi teachers use metaphoric imagery such as “wave hands like clouds” to help students integrate smooth movements with a focussed mind. Current interactive technologies applied to Tai Chi take a very literal approach, focussing on body position and centre of gravity. In contrast, "Tai Chi In The Clouds" is a system which uses micro unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) as "clouds" to lead or follow the movements of the hands, giving live feedback on smoothness of movement via LEDs. We used UAVs to aid the experience of living out the metaphoric imagery used in Tai Chi. With our work we aim to contribute to new design language to support movement based, mind-body practices.
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| 7. |
- Sondoqah, Mousa, et al.
(författare)
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Programming Human-Drone Interactions : Lessons from the Drone Arena Challenge
- 2024
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Ingår i: MOBISYS 2024 - Proceedings of the 10th Workshop on Micro Aerial Vehicle Networks, Systems, and Applications, DroNet 2024 and the 22nd Annual International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications and Services. - : Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). ; , s. 49-54
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- We report on the lessons we learned on programming human-drone interactions during a three-day challenge where five teams of drone novices each programmed a nanodrone to be piloted through an obstacle course using bodily movement. Center to the participants' learning process was the eventual shift from the deceptively simple idea of seamless human-drone interactions, to the reality of drones as non-predictable systems prone to crashes. This happened as participants had to first realize, then to deal with the limitations of the drone's resource-constrained hardware. Coping with these limitations was crucially complicated by the lack of appropriate programming abstractions, which led participants to focus on plenty of low-level, sometimes immaterial details, while losing focus on the ultimate objectives. We find concrete evidence of these observations in how participants handled the visibility problem in debugging drone behaviors, applied different defensive coding techniques, and altered their piloting practice. Our insights may inform further research efforts in drone programming, especially in the vastly uncharted territory of human-drone interactions.
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