We present mechanical sympathy as a generative design concept for cultivating somaesthetic relationships with machines and machine-like systems. We identify the qualities of mechanical sympathy using the design case of How to Train your Drone (HTTYD), a unique human-drone research product designed to explore the process by which people discover and co-create the somaesthetic potential of drones. We articulate the qualities – (i) machine-agency, (ii) oscillations, and (iii) aesthetic pursuits – by using descriptive and reflective accounts of our design strategies and of our co-creators engaging with the system. We also discuss how each quality can extend soma design research; conceptualizing of appreciative, temporal, and idiosyncratic relationships with machines that can complement technical learning and enrich human-machine interaction. Finally, we ground our concept in a similar selection of works from across the HCI community.

Soma design processes are known to be slow and thoughtful, demanding personal engagement, authenticity and deep somatic engagements with both ourselves and the interactive materials. What happens when such designerly ways of knowing meet with industrial design thinking? Together with IKEA – a large furniture manufacturer – we collaborated to design for better sleep. Based on years of experience and prior somatic knowledge of designing for body awareness, the academic team staged a progression of somatic experiences for a joint one-day workshop. We contribute to interaction design epistemology by uncovering frictions and alignments between two designerly ways of knowing with distinct identities and values. In particular, we critically reflect on how to approach material choices, somatic cultivation and the notion of solutionism.

Through a soma design process, we explored how to design a shape-changing car seat as a point of interaction between the car and the driver. We developed a low-fdelity prototyping tool to support this design work and describe our experiences of using this tool in a workshop with a car manufacturer. We share the co-designed patterns that we developed: re-engaging in driving; dis-engaging from driving; saying farewell; and being held while turning. Our analysis contributes design knowledge on how we should design for a car seat to ‘touch’ larger, potentially heavier parts of the body including the back, shoulders, hips, and bottom. The non-habitual experience of shape-changing elements in the driver seat helped pinpoint the link between somatic experience and intelligent rational behaviour in driving tasks. Relevant meaning-making processes arose when the two were aligned, improving on the holistic coming together of driver, car, and the road travelled.

Soma design is intimately entangled with the politics, not only of design itself, but of bodies. We combine perspectives from soma design, political theory, and Sara Ahmed’s work The Cultural Politics of Emotions, to develop five political provocations that reflect on the politics of soma design and the possibilities and frictions therein. Inspired by soma design’s roots in somaesthetic philosophy, our five provocations are (i) Knowledge and Ways of Knowing; (ii) The Self and Self-Knowledge; (iii) Felt Ethics and Right Action; (iv) The Pursuit of Happiness; and (v) Justice and the Emotional Labour of Transformation. Our contribution intends to foster reflection on the politics implicit within soma design practice.

How To Train Your Drone is a novel human-drone interaction that demonstrates the generative potential of a design metaphor: the umwelt. We describe the concept of the umwelt and detail how we applied it to inform our soma design process, creating an interactive space where somatic understandings between human and drone could emerge. The system was deployed for a month into a shared household. We describe how three people explored and shaped the umwelts of their drones, leading to unique and intimate human-drone couplings. We discuss the compatibility of the umwelt to soma design practice and identify future avenues for research inspired by artificial life and evolutionary robotics. As our contribution, we illustrate how the umwelt as a design metaphor, can open up a generative new design space for human-drone interaction.

Interactive systems have become an integral part of our daily lives, influencing how we communicate, work, and play. Understanding the intricate relationship between humans and technology is at the core of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) research and design. Amid the array of methodological tools available, first-person research methods have emerged as powerful instruments that enable researchers to delve deeply into the human-technology experience. Five years after the first edition of the Designing Interactive Systems (DIS) workshop on first-person methods, this full day workshop invites HCI researchers, practitioners, and enthusiasts to embark on a journey of discovery of their sample of one. Drawing inspiration from the rich tradition of autoethnography, autobiographical design, embodied ideation, and more, we aim to explore the omnipresence of technology in our everyday lives while acknowledging our own subjectivity and positionality in research and design.

We report on the lessons we learned on programming human-drone interactions during a three-day challenge where five teams of drone novices each programmed a nanodrone to be piloted through an obstacle course using bodily movement. Center to the participants' learning process was the eventual shift from the deceptively simple idea of seamless human-drone interactions, to the reality of drones as non-predictable systems prone to crashes. This happened as participants had to first realize, then to deal with the limitations of the drone's resource-constrained hardware. Coping with these limitations was crucially complicated by the lack of appropriate programming abstractions, which led participants to focus on plenty of low-level, sometimes immaterial details, while losing focus on the ultimate objectives. We find concrete evidence of these observations in how participants handled the visibility problem in debugging drone behaviors, applied different defensive coding techniques, and altered their piloting practice. Our insights may inform further research efforts in drone programming, especially in the vastly uncharted territory of human-drone interactions.

In a long-term commitment to designing for the aesthetics of human–drone interactions, we have been troubled by the lack of tools for shaping and interactively feeling drone behaviours. By observing participants in a three-day drone challenge, we isolated components of drones that, if made transparent, could have helped participants better explore their aesthetic potential. Through a bricolage approach to analysing interviews, field notes, video recordings, and inspection of each team’s code, we describe how teams 1) shifted their efforts from aiming for seamless human–drone interaction, to seeing drones as fragile, wilful, and prone to crashes; 2) engaged with intimate, bodily interactions to more precisely probe, understand and define their drone’s capabilities; 3) adopted different workaround strategies, emphasising either training the drone or the pilot. We contribute an empirical account of constraints in shaping the potential aesthetics of drone behaviour, and discuss how programming environments could better support somaesthetic perception–action loops for design and programming purposes.

Workshop ideation activities are often described with little attention to the role of the facilitator - a role often portrayed as following a recipe, and not getting in the way of the process. Our experience tells a different story. In this provocation, we argue that the role of facilitator needs to be carefully considered and performed. We propose an active role for facilitators where they may encourage or challenge the process, allow risk, handle vulnerabilities (including their own), and assist in articulating the unknown, unclear, and hazy, as it emerges. To do this, facilitators acknowledge their own presence and concerns, while simultaneously handling processual ethics and iterative consent. We counterbalance the tendency to offer workshop guidelines by offering instead ten permissions for design activities that acknowledge the role of the facilitator and, inspired by Judith Butler's thought on accountability, open up to moments of unknowingness.

There is an increasing interest in the HCI community in designing for bodily practices. We report on a soma design process for martial arts and the resulting artifact – an interactive wooden dummy. Through a detailed account of the design process, we show how it enriched and revamped the bodily practice, but also how it changed the martial arts expert in the design team. Based on a phenomenological account of his experiences, we argue that the estrangement methods in soma design may allow practitioners engaging as soma designers, to cultivate and create new artistic habits fused with thought and feeling, changing themselves and their practice in directions they seek.