Project Leader: Dr. Joseph La Delfa
Official Project Website: https://www.cafeciaojoe.com/httyd
Status: Completed
Project Description
This project combined soma design and product design engineering methods to develop a novel interactive system that leveraged bodily ways of engaging with drones. Our goal was to create space for people to pursue different ways of using drones and making meaning with the technology in the context of their own lives and desired experiences.
We applied the design concepts of mechanical sympathy and umwelt to encourage people to somatically explore the system, teaching it to recognise and respond to their bodies in different positions. We deployed How to Train your Drone to a shared household for one month, where three people trained their own drones for dancing, yoga, and playful tomfoolery in the home.
Highlighted Publications
🏆 [PDF] La Delfa and Garrett, Lampinen, and Höök. 2024. Articulating Mechanical Sympathy for Somaesthetic Human-Machine Relations. In Proceedings of the 2024 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS ’24). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 3336–3353. https://doi.org/10.1145/3643834.3661514
[PDF] La Delfa, Garrett, Lampinen, and Höök. 2024. How to Train Your Drone: Exploring the umwelt as a design metaphor for human-drone interaction. In Proceedings of the 2024 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS ’24). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 2987–3001. https://doi.org/10.1145/3643834.3660737
Rachael Garrett 
