Children in 2077: Designing Children’s Technologies in the Age of Transhumanism

What for and how will we design children’s technologies in the transhumanism age, and what stance will we take as designers? This paper aims to answer this question with 13 fictional abstracts from sixteen authors of different countries, institutions and disciplines. Transhumanist thinking envisions enhancing human body and mind by blending human biology with technological augmentations. Fundamentally, it seeks to improve the human species, yet the impacts of such movement are unknown and the implications on children’s lives and technologies were not explored deeply. In an age, where technologies can clearly be defined as transhumanist, such as under-skin chips or brain-machine interfaces, our aim is to reveal probable pitfalls and benefits of those technologies on children’s’ lives by using the power of design fiction

Integrated Apparatus for Empirical Studies with Embodied Autonomous Social Drones

International audienceCurrent use cases for drones often involve a remote human operator and/or an environment which is inaccessible to humans. Social drones, which we define as autonomous drones that operate in close proximity to human users or bystanders, are distinct from these. The design of social drones, in terms of both aesthetics and behavior, can involve particular human factors that require further study. Currently, in lieu of empirical studies with autonomous embodied agents, approaches such as Wizard of Oz methods, questionnaires, videos, and/or makeshift mechanisms are often employed to investigate interactions with social drones. For empirical design research using embodied, co-located drones, we have been developing an experimental setup that enables high precision drone control, as well as rich multimodal data collection and analysis, in an integrated fashion. We present this apparatus and its rationale in this paper. Using this setup, we aim to advance our understanding of the psychology and ergonomics of interacting with autonomous social drones through experiments, and extract design implications