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.

The concept of ‘bodywork´ refers to the work individuals undertake on their own bodies and the bodies of others. One aspect is attending to bodily needs, which is often overlooked in the workplace and HCI/CSCW research on work practices. Yet, this labour can be a significant barrier to work, consequential to work, and prone to spill over into other aspects of life. We present three empirical cases of bodywork: gig-based food delivery, shift work in hospitals and bars, and office-based knowledge work. We describe what attending to bodily needs at work entails and illustrate tactics employed so that work can be carried on, even when the body (or technology optimising it) breaks down. Arguing that all systems are bodily systems, we conclude with a call to acknowledge the centrality of bodies in all work and the roles technologies can play in supporting or constraining bodywork differently for different workers.

Food delivery platforms are designed to match on-demand workers with jobs and then manage, monitor, and assess their performance. These platforms provide workers with a digital representation of delivery work. Once a worker accepts a delivery job they need to deal with the complexities of an unsettled urban landscape with varied infrastructures, traffic, and regulations. In particular, the Global South presents a demanding context for this type of work, given less clearly mapped addresses alongside other socio-cultural intricacies. In order to understand how food delivery workers bridge gaps and mismatches between the demands of the app and the realities encountered in situ, for this paper we shadowed six delivery workers over the course of their working day delivering food in Pune, India. The six workers included a complete novice and more experienced riders. We used helmet mounted cameras to record the delivery work, and how our participants managed the extra demands of food delivery work during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our moment-by-moment analysis of the video data is informed by the methodological traditions of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis. While the food delivery platform imposes a detailed workflow expected to be performed alone by the worker, our detailed video analysis reveals the collaborative nature of delivery work. We highlight how workers draw upon their ability to participate in ‘fleeting alliances’ and produce ‘frugal collaboration’ with co-located others, such as other delivery workers or security guards. This allows them to resolve everyday troubles, often learning or imparting ‘the tricks of the trade’ in the process. While gig platforms have commonly been presented as disruptive technologies for coordinating, regulating, and assessing gig workers individually and independently, our findings highlight collaboration as a critically important aspect of food delivery work.

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.

Food delivery platforms are location-based services that rely on minimal, quantifiable data points, such as GPS location, to represent and manage labor. Drawing upon an ethnographic study of food delivery work in India during the COVID-19 pandemic, we illustrate the challenges gig workers face when working with a platform that uses their (phone’s) GPS location to monitor and control their movement. Further, we describe how these, along with the platform’s opaque, location-based logics, shape the delivery workflow. We also document how the platform selectively represented workers’ bodies during the pandemic to portray them as safe and sterile, describing workers’ tactics in responding to issues arising from asymmetric platform policies. In discussion, we consider what we can learn from understanding gig workers as ‘infrastructure’, commonly overlooked but visible upon breakdown. We conclude by reflecting on how we might center gig workers’ well-being and bodily needs in 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.

Attending to emotion can shed light on why recognizing an ethical issue and taking responsibility for it can be so demanding. To examine emotions related to taking or not taking responsibility for ethical action, we conducted a semi-structured interview study with 23 individuals working in interaction design and developing AI systems in Scandinavian countries. Through a thematic analysis of how participants attribute ethical responsibility, we identify three ethical stances, that is, discursive approaches to answering the question 'who should act': an individualized I-stance ("the responsibility is mine"), a collective we-stance ("the responsibility is ours"), and a distanced they-stance ("the responsibility is someone else's"). Further, we introduce the concepts of distancing and vulnerability to analyze the emotion work that these three ethical stances place on technology practitioners in situations of low- and high-scale technology development, where they have more or less control over the outcomes of their work. We show how the we- and they-stances let technology practitioners distance themselves from the results of their activity, while the I-stance makes them more vulnerable to emotional and material risks. By illustrating the emotional dimensions involved in recognizing ethical issues and embracing responsibility, our study contributes to the field of Ethics in Practice. We argue that emotions play a pivotal role in technology practitioners' decision-making process, influencing their choices to either take action or refrain from doing so.

The ‘intimate horizons’ of algorithmic, self-tracking technologies have become increasingly important. These applications are no longer perceived as distant, instrumental entities, but offer a more affective and intimate experience. In this paper, we address the long-term experience of living with a digital contraception technology that utilizes self-tracking. We draw upon four design workshops with a total of 14 users of the app Natural Cycles to illustrate moments of ambivalent affects and oscillating relations. Based on our analysis, we concretize four dimensions of ambivalence in different scales and temporalities. We propose three strategies of designing with these unavoidable disruptions, conflicting feelings, and shifting relations to acknowledge users’ agentic engagements, nuanced dynamics of intimate self-tracking experiences, and users as embodied and affective beings. We contend that by attending to these existential ambivalences, digital contraceptive can become better configured to plural modes of life and long-term intimate relations that they engender.

We theoretically develop the ethical positions implicit in somaesthetic interaction design and, using the case study of a water faucet, illustrate our conceptual understanding of ethical sensibilities in design. We apply four lenses – the felt self, intercorporeal self, socio-cultural and political self, and entangled self – to show how our selves and ethical sensibilities are fundamentally constituted by a socially, materially, and technologically entwined world. Further, we show how ethical sensibilities are cultivated in the practice of somaesthetic interaction design. We contribute felt ethics as an approach to cultivating ethical sensibilities in design practice. The felt ethics approach is comprised of (i) a processual cultivation of ethical sensibility through analytical, pragmatic, and practical engagement, (ii) an ongoing critical attentiveness to the limits of our own bodies and lived experiences, and (iii) the rendering visible of our ethical practices as a matter of care.