Exploring the Design Space of Emotional Support Drones

Recent work in the interaction community has revealed drones as having the potential to be social entities with emotional capabilities going beyond their traditional ontological status of mechanical objects. We build upon this work and envision drones as an emotional support technology. To evaluate this concept, we gathered constitutive elements shown to affect people’s perception of drones and robots. We then refined these elements by interviewing experts from different disciplines (N=10) and generated six factors: Representation, Essence, Physicality, Embodiment, Personification, and Grounded that constitute an Emotional Support Drone (ESD) design space. We further explored this design space with potential users in a series of participatory design workshops (N=18) and observed congruence between participant’s perceptions of ESDs and in how they imagined interacting with them. We contribute to the growing field of human-drone interaction.