From the Ground Up: Designerly Knowledge in Human-Drone Interaction

There are flying robots out there — you may have seen and heard them, droning over your head. Drones have expanded our human capacities, lifting our sight to the skies, but not without generating intricate experiences. How are these machines being designed and researched? What design methods, approaches, and philosophies are relevant to the study of the development (or decline) of drones in society? In this thesis, I argue that we must re-frame how drones are studied, from the ground up, through a design stance. I invite you to take a journey with me, with changing lenses from the work of others to my own intimate relationship with this technology. My work relies on exploring the fringes of design research: understudied groups such as children, alternative design approaches such as soma design, and peripheral methods such as autoethnography.This thesis includes four articles discussing perspectives on designerly knowledge, composing a frame surrounding the notion that we may be missing out on some of the aspects of the wicked nature of human-drone interaction (HDI) design. The methods are poised on phenomenology and narratives, and supported by the assumption that any subject of study is a sociotechnical assemblage. Starting through a first-person perspective, I offer a contribution to the gap in research through a longitudinal autoethnographic study conducted with my children. The second paper comes in the form of a pictorial expressing a first-person experience during a design research workshop, and what that meant for my relationship with drones as a research material. The third paper leaps into a Research through Design project, challenging the solutionist drone and offering instead the first steps in a concept-driven design of the unlikely pairing of drones and breathing. The fourth paper returns to the pictorial form, suggesting a method for visual conversations between researchers through the tangible qualities of sketches and illustrations. Central to this thesis, is the argument for designerly approaches in HDI and championing the need for alternative forms of publication and research. To that end, I include two publications in the form of pictorials: a publication format relying on visual knowledge and with growing interest in the HCI community

Living with Drones, Robots, and Young Children: Informing Research through Design with Autoethnography

Supporting the study of child-drone interaction in domestic spaces is a difficult endeavour, but of value to the development of this robotic platform. This paper presents an autoethnographic study, serving as an exploratory first-person method to surface issues and opportunities in this design space. Autoethnography is increasingly popular in HCI, but to further support its application, I combine it with a Sociotechnical Systems (StS) perspective, informing the analysis and development of descriptive narratives with systems theory. This paper is based on a year-long documentation of the interaction between my family and a set of three land robots and one flying robot. I present work in the form of critical incidents and lessons learned, and a set of design opportunities for child-drone interaction to inform a research through design probe development. The combination between StS and autoethnography proved fruitful in understanding how drones may currently be brought or gifted into the home without fully considering the effects and implications of their use. Furthermore, I offer reflections on the use of autoethnography for other researchers when living and involving their family with their research material

TTRPG UX: Requirements & Beyond

Tabletop Role Playing Games (TTRPG) allow the player to immerse themselves in a world where anything can happen - within the rules. You can become someone new, fight demons, play out exciting and speculative storylines, all with the help of your party. This ability to place yourself in the life of another person (or ethereal being) resonates with principles of User Experience Design (UX) where usability experts strive to understand the impact their application or interface might have on a hypothetical audience. This paper explores the parallels and potentials of TTRPG within the context of UX and Requirements, its characters, contexts and interactions. We propose creating playable UX worlds with the potential to provide deeper, more insightful output, and make recommendations for the addition of a TTRPG approach to User Experience processes

Screenshots as Photography in Gamescapes: An Annotated Psychogeography of Imaginary Places

Travel is an integral part of our lives, whether for work or leisure. Since the advent of photography, we have documented our journeys, often sharing the images with friends and family to reflect upon the experience, tell stories, or invite commentary. We often lose ourselves in digital media - film, documentary and games - particularly during times when physical travel is unavailable. In this pictorial, we explore the travels of a single player through hundreds of games, presenting annotated game screenshots as photo-documentary through gamescapes, and as a form of the New Games Journalism. We present a New Games Travelogue traversing and formulating the psychogeography of games as imaginary places, and through this process, we unveil transdisciplinary tensions in negotiating and perceiving the importance of visual knowledge in games research, encouraging other researchers to join us in this practice

What Matters in Professional Drone Pilots’ Practice? An Interview Study to Understand the Complexity of Their Work and Inform Human-Drone Interaction Research

Human-drone interaction is a growing topic of interest within HCI research. Researchers propose many innovative concepts for drone applications, but much of this research does not incorporate knowledge on existing applications already adopted by professionals. This limits the validity of said research. To address this limitation, we present our fndings from an in-depth interview study with 10 professional drone pilots. Our participants were armed with signifcant experience and qualifcations - pertinent to both drone operations and a set of applications covering diverse industries. Our fndings have resulted in design recommendations that should inform both ends and means of human-drone interaction research. These include, but are not limited to: safety-related protocols, insights from domain-specifc use cases, and relevant practices outside of hands-on fight

Conversations with Myself: Sketching Workshop Experiences in Design Epistemology

I was not born a designer – sometime this identity shift must have happened. I was unaware of it, and if asked, I would still not know how to define a “designer”. Drawing and sketching are activities intrinsic to the design discipline, and are widely understood as tools for communication, documentation, or artefact-driven reasoning. But are they also essential to the understanding of design knowledge? Or a symptom of a designer\u27s identity rather than a tool for “designerly ways of knowing”? During a week-long design workshop I dealt with difficulties making sense of a panoply of embodied design methods in the absence of a sketchbook. In this pictorial I describe my self-diagnosis as a sketch-bound designer, unable to digest abstract knowledge without holding a pen. I advocate for sketching as focusing, and a primary activity in design epistemology that needs no other than a first-person reason to be performed

Ritual drones: Designing and studying critical flying companions

Through a critical design approach, I suggest new perspectives on social drones, particularly companion drones. Supported by philosophies such as slow technology, I propose the design of anti-solutionist ritual drones and the study of their impact on the lives of users, particularly in domestic contexts. I intend to fill some of the methodological gaps identified, such as longitudinal studies in drone user experience through ethnography and auto-ethnography. I propose a "Research through Design"process of custom domestic probes for children and their families

Nebula: Artistic Somaesthetic Appreciation with Biosignals in Virtual Reality

The combination of Virtual Reality and Biosignals is a developing area of research, and a design space with promising possibilities and implications for art and creativity. In this demonstration, we focus on supporting an engaging personal creative experience in Virtual Reality, making use of respiration, heart-rate, and gestures. The interactive modalities afford a new medium for art-making, and are potentially conducive to well-being. Our interactive experience stems from a Research through Design process and informed by Soma Design, interviews with artists, and preliminary user studies. We present Nebula - an immersive VR experience aimed at supporting a user\u27s somaesthetic appreciation and well-being

Conversational Composites: A Method for Illustration Layering

The conversational nature of sketches is a widespread topic of research. Understanding drawing as a cognitive activity is commonly accepted, and many of the most extensively used methods within Human-Computer Interaction recruit sketching as a technique for ideation, explanation, documentation, and conversation. To further develop the use of this illustration process as a tool of knowledge production, we suggest a novel sketching method. We present Conversational Composites: a flexible method grounded in the material and tangible qualities of sketching in different forms and media, creating physical and digital layers of conversation between participants. We present and reflect on the proposed method through an applied case of a conversation between a PhD student and her supervisor, and offer suggestions on how it may be adapted and appropriated by other researchers in the HCI community