Hi everyone, and thanks for joining me on my talk about designing Drone Chi
unpacking the thinking and making of somaesthetic human drone interaction
Drone Chi was designed to facilitate exploration of movement and reflection
on that movement it's primarily achieved by making the drone respond to small
changes in the way you move breathe and balance yourself. So to start off let's
move through the Drone Chi experience together. You begin by taking a flower
from a vine. Then you put the hand pads on one for each hand
and your hands slightly curved around each hand pad. Once the drone is in the
air you are instructed to move your hands around and explore what makes the
light bright. Then the drone starts moving in a circle and you begin to
maintain the brightness of that light by following it with your hands.
Eventually the control switches over to you and you can lead the drone anywhere
around the room this requires coordination and slow
movement. The design of drone Chi mainly rests on two design principles.
The first is Soma Design which is motivated by improving one's quality of
life through cultivating an appreciation for sensory experiences.
Basically, if you can develop your ability to reflect on what you are
feeling you are better able to appreciate and create your lived
experience. A typical example is mediated body, which uses the act of touching
another person to modulate an electronic sound and that brings attention
to the sensations of touching that person. It's a platform to explore moving
with another person and it often has a facilitator to guide the user through
the experience to create a playful and dynamic aesthetic. Product Design
Engineering is the other design discipline that's heavily leant on in
the design of Drone Chi and it is the industrial design and manufacturing
engineering of consumer products. It is motivated by user centeredness
manufacturability and cost. There are no facilitators in the final product so
in the design of this office chair for example the levers and
knobs need to be intuitive. The design process would be familiar to most
designers. Product Design Engineers use mood boards sketching and prototypes in an
attempt to meet user requirements within engineering limitations. So we've got
Soma Design and Product Design Engineering. Soma design is slow,
meandering and the end result is often facilitated. Whereas Product Design is
quick direct and the end results often are unaccompanied. This talk is about how
the line is blurred between them in the design process. You will see how they
combine to help us work within the narrow technical limitations that come
with working with really small drones and turn them into opportunities for an
aesthetic experience. For example in the design of the shape of the drone.
You also see how they combined to deliver something that emulates aspects of Tai
Chi but maintained in intuitiveness in use for example in the design of the
flight path that the drone takes when you follow the drone with
your hands. So if you look at the raw materials of Drone Chi, there are some
challenges. We've got the blades, they are spinning very fast and a kind of
threatening, they carry negative preconceptions and not the kind of
materials that you want to start with for a somaesthetic interaction. On a
technical side they can't carry much weight and the markers have to be
arranged in a particular way for the motion capture system to recognize them.
But what the motion capture system does offer is that direct manipulation of the
drone so when you first move with them you immediately recognize that potential
for a somaesthetic experience, your movements are intimately tied to the drone there
was definitely something meditative about it and that needed to be
cultivated. So I took Tai Chi classes, and there were three aspects that I wanted
to come through in the final experience from my Tai Chi classes. They were the
coordination of the limbs slow movement and imagery. So what I mean by imagery is
that I was often imagining myself doing something else being something else or
being someplace else, whilst I was in my Tai Chi classes and
this imagery also helped us in the design process. An emblematic movement of
these aspects of Tai Chi is 'Cloud Hands' where the hands move left and right as
you see, and the fingers are kind of trailing and gently brushing against the
cloud so to speak which is what you kind
of imagine when you do that the movement. So we drew from this image and created a
basic prototype that just kind of flew around the person we also make
this kind of quick fluffy mock-up and did some informal testing at a couple of
conferences. At this point we drew from Product Design Engineering and wrote a
Product Design Specification this is kind of like a returned brief a list of
things the product has to do to meet the brief. With the added layer of the
aesthetic considerations that are taken from Tai Chi, the coordination the slow
movement, the imagery so boxing these amorphous subjective first person
experiences and putting them into a specification list seems
kind of intuitive but it worked well for us, we use kind of open-ended language
and referred to it often in the design process. So moving forward we started to
explore form and texture and now you see more familiar processes from Product
Design Engineering, for example here on the bottom can we change the profile of
the drone to a jellyfish with super light foam. But in doing so we came
across this problem where in the jellyfish frame, there was this weak
point and in order to solve it we integrated
further into the chassis but in doing so we kind of fell upon
this idea of using the carbon as loops and loops that look like petals
and so we landed on this flower design in trying to solve an engineering
problem but because of the prevalence of imagery in Tai Chi we looked at the
drone moving left and right when flying and we saw a lotus flower floating on
the surface of the pond so we drew upon that idea to fill out the
design of not just the drone but also the hand pads. So when it came to mapping
the drone to the body we also drew from the imagery of Tai Chi to generate ideas
this is one example inspired by a movement called 'holding the ball' and we
use the first personal experience of doing this movement in class and compare
it to moving it with a drone and make changes to the mapping accordingly . Again,
this is covered more in depth in the paper. As we developed a mapping to the
body to emulate the feel of Tai Chi at this point the role of following the
drones started to become more clear. In developing the role of following the
drone we had a more user centered focus with the intention of
following the drone as acting more of an onboarding or intro for new users.
So these are some of the flight paths that the drone followed before the
participants would lead lead the drone themselves. We will just spend
a bit of time explaining the last two. The third iteration you see
there is when people started following the drone in a horizontal circle and
they kind of just walked back and forth aimlessly around the room. But we wanted
more slow and repetitive, unfamiliar movements to introduce them to this
experience without of course, explicitly telling them. So we moved the spiral to a
vertical plane as you see on the very right hand side and this was this had a
great effect as it the quads shifted the weight it was much
closer to the kind of movements you would feel in Tai Chi and more
importantly at this stage was something that the users could immediately
understand without instruction. So I hope I've shown how these two design
processes have successfully intertwined with each other as you can see on this
timeline there are more examples of this in the paper so please check that out.
To finish I'll leave you with a set of questions I was constantly asking myself
during the design process and they were, "How can I share this experience with
someone else through the drone? What are the essential sensory elements to the
experience? How can I introduce these to a user? How can I reliably engineer a
system to deliver these interactions. Thank You