Drones are an exciting technology that is quickly being adopted in the global
consumer market. Africa has become a center of deployment with the first drone
airport established in Rwanda and drones currently being used for applications
such as medical deliveries, agriculture, and wildlife monitoring. Despite this
increasing presence of drones, there is a lack of research on stakeholders'
perspectives from this region. We ran a human-drone interaction user study
(N=15) with experts from several sub-Saharan countries using a co-design
methodology. Participants described novel applications and identified important
design aspects for the integration of drones in this context. Our results
highlight the potential of drones to address real world problems, the need for
them to be culturally situated, and the importance of considering the social
aspects of their interaction with humans. This research highlights the need for
diverse perspectives in the human-drone interaction design process.Comment: To be published in the ACM conference on Designing Interactive
Systems (DIS '20