Designing and Prototyping Drones for Emotional Support

Abstract

Recent work in the interaction community has revealed that drones can potentially become social entities with emotional capabilities beyond the traditional ontological status of drones as mechanical objects. We build upon this work to envision drones as an emotional support technology. We ran a series of exploratory design workshops with lay users (N=18) to create designs for a companion drone to explore this notion. We used their inputs to analyze the drone's concept for prototyping and future work.