Shaping and Being Shaped by Drones: Supporting Perception-Action Loops

We report on a three-day challenge during which five teams each programmed a nanodrone to be piloted through an obstacle course using bodily movement, in a 3D transposition of the '80s video-game Pacman. Using a bricolage approach to analyse interviews, field notes, video recordings, and inspection of each team's code revealed how participants were shaping and, in turn, became shaped in bodily ways by the drones' limitations. We observed how teams adapted to compete by: 1) shifting from aiming for seamless human-drone interaction, to seeing drones as fragile, wilful, and prone to crashes; 2) engaging with intimate, bodily interactions to more precisely understand, probe, and delimit each drone's capabilities; 3) adopting different strategies, emphasising either training the drone or training the pilot. We contribute with an empirical, somaesthetically focused account of current challenges in HDI and call for programming environments that support action-feedback loops for design and programming purposes.