=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-2617/paper5
|storemode=property
|title=How We Own Drones: On the Sense of Ownership in the Drone Design
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2617/paper5.pdf
|volume=Vol-2617
|authors=Anastasia Kuzminykh,Jessica Cauchard
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/chi/KuzminykhC20a
}}
==How We Own Drones: On the Sense of Ownership in the Drone Design==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2617/paper5.pdf
How We Own Drones: On the Sense of
Ownership in the Drone Design
Anastasia Kuzminykh Jessica R. Cauchard Abstract
Cheriton School of Computer Ben Gurion University of the While HCI research on the sense of ownership over techno-
Science, University of Waterloo Negev logical possession is actively developing, there is a notice-
Waterloo, Canada Be’er Sheva, Israel
able lack of understanding of how users develop and expe-
akuzminykh@uwaterloo.ca jcauchard@bgu.ac.il
rience ownership over social drones. In this position paper,
we discuss how the specifics of drone technology, such as
the possibility of autonomous operation mode, their ability
to act as user’s proxy on a distance, and users’ tendency
for anthropomorphization, might bring unique aspects to
the user’s sense of psychological ownership over drones
compared to other technological possessions. Furthermore,
we suggest that the sense of ownership is one of the fun-
damental questions in human-drone interaction and spans
through major user-centered concerns in drone design.
Author Keywords
ownership; possessions; drones; values; social context.
CCS Concepts
•Human-centered computing → HCI theory, concepts
and models;
This paper is published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International
(CC-BY 4.0) license. Authors reserve their rights to disseminate the work on their
personal and corporate Web sites with the appropriate attribution.
Introduction
Interdisciplinary Workshop on Human-Drone Interaction (iHDI 2020) With the rapid development of the drone technology and
CHI ’20 Extended Abstracts, 26 April 2020, Honolulu, HI, US its fast growing adoption in the global consumer market,
© Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 License.
the question of user’s perceived ownership over drones
becomes ever more relevant to the HDI community.
The state, in which individuals experience a psychological distance, and even without the direct input from their user.
connection with an object, feeling this object as “theirs”, For example, FlyingBuddy robot [15] was designed to aug-
has been defined as psychological ownership [3, 26, 11, 9]. ment human mobility and perceptibility, including the sce-
Psychological ownership is conceptually distinguished from narios where the drone could be flying to see things beyond
legal ownership based on its dual, cognitive-affective nature the user’s field of view, or reporting accidents from above.
[10, 22]. This means, that besides the intellectual percep- Another project proposed using drone-based flying dis-
tion of some object as one’s possession, the psychological plays as personal companions (e.g., during sports), or as
ownership also includes an emotional component [23], e.g. a way to actively support people in emergency situations
more favorable evaluation of the object [24, 19]. (e.g., search and rescue) [25]. Such ability to perform tasks
in a distance, and thus, to spatially augment human abili-
While the understanding of the sense of ownership is get- ties, means that drones might become a proxy of their user,
ting more and more attention in human-computer interac- while still acting autonomously.
tion in general [16, 5, 20, 13, 19, 14, 18], the specifics of
forming the sense of ownership over drones, and espe- Finally, and in tight relation to the first two distinguishing as-
cially social drones, are yet poorly understood. At the same pects of the drone interaction design, many studies demon-
time, as we demonstrate in this paper, there is a number of strate the users’ persistent tendency to anthropomorphize
reasons to assume that the sense of ownership over this drones. For example, previous research showed that peo-
particular type of technology might have its unique aspects. ple interact with drones as with a person or a pet [6]. Fur-
thermore, the anthropomorphization through the perception
Key Specifics of Drones of personality and emotions in robot’s behaviours is com-
For the purpose of exploring the potential unique aspects of monly deliberately designed into drones [8].
ownership over social drones, here we discuss three distin-
guishing features of the drone interaction design: possible While these features are not the only unique aspects of
autonomy, ability to act as user’s proxy on a distance, and drone design that distinguish them from other ubiquitous
users’ tendency to anthropomorphize drones. devices, in this particular paper, we specifically consider
autonomy, ability to act as user’s proxy, and anthropomor-
First, the unrivaled feature of drones is that, as technol- phization of drones, to illustrate how these factors might po-
ogy, they encapsulate two possible modes of operation – tentially affect the unique sense of ownership in the context
autonomous, fully automated task performance (e.g. path of drone technology.
following), and manual, real-time pilot-controlled task perfor-
mance [7]. We suggest that the possibility of autonomous Sense of Ownership in the Drone Design
operation might potentially have an effect on sense of own- Understanding of Ownership in HCI
ership of a drone, i.e. by changing the balance of the per- Despite the fact that our understanding of psychological
ceived decision-making responsibilities. ownership over different technologies is still rather frac-
tured and predominantly descriptive [5, 20, 13, 19, 14, 18,
Second, unlike most of the technologies common in global
17], there are some preliminary efforts to develop the HCI-
consumer adoption, drones can perform their tasks on a
focused adaptation of the theoretical conceptualization of other technological possessions. One of the motivations for
ownership from other areas of knowledge. such question is that the identified key specifics of drones –
the possibility of autonomous operation mode [7], ability to
For instance, in the recent work [16], we have analyzed sev- act as user’s proxy [25, 15], and users’ tendency for anthro-
eral examples of HCI papers on the technology possession pomorphization [6, 8] – are, arguably, affecting each of the
in context of multidisciplinary research on ownership (e.g. five dimensions of psychological ownership.
[22, 1, 21, 23]), and illustrated how the mechanisms and ra-
tionalizations of the perceptions of ownership over physical For example, the dimension of self-identity, when the pos-
and digital objects can be mapped to the previously devel- session becomes an extension of the owner’s self [1, 9, 4],
oped multi-dimensional structure of ownership. Specifically, could be expected to be significantly affected by the percep-
we suggested the following five dimensions of ownership for tion of a drone as a separate autonomous identity.
a particular consideration in HCI research:
Furthermore, the dimension of self-efficacy – users’ beliefs
(a) Self-identity reflecting the object of possession becom- in their ability to accomplish tasks [12, 1, 21, 22] – could
ing an aspect of a “representation” of an owner; depend on the expected level of user’s participation in the
actual task performance, which is currently unclear for the
(b) Self-efficacy reflecting the owner’s judgement of their drone technology.
capability and competence to perform a task and to con-
trol the object; Similarly, accountability and responsibility factors in psy-
chological ownership are potentially much more flexible in
(c) Accountability and Responsibility reflecting the vol- human-drone interaction, if the level of expected user’s par-
untary or enforced authority and obligation to take care ticipation in the task performance is reduced and the focus
of the object and related performances, consequences, is shifted to the drone’s decision making.
and issues;
While the autonomy dimension of of ownership seem to be
(d) Autonomy reflecting the owner’s judgement of their the most similar to the ownership over other technology, in
capability to independently initiate decisions and actions the context of drone design it opens an exciting avenue for
with the object; the investigation of legal and ethical challenges associated
(e) Territoriality reflecting the owner’s identification of their with the restrictions on drones’ task performances.
possession through external references and causing an
Finally, the ownership dimension of territoriality in drone
owner to defend the object if ownership is endangered.
design is, arguably, one of the most novel directions in de-
sign research, since the drone’s unique autonomous and
Specifics of Ownership in HDI
long-distance nature of task performance make it to be a
In this paper, we raise the question of how the sense of
proxy of its user/owner. However, the understanding of the
ownership over social drones might differ from the own-
mechanisms of territoriality in such task performance is yet
ership over other technologies, and what aspects would,
drastically underdeveloped.
in contrary, yield similarities with sense of ownership over
The Role of Ownership in Drone Design social drones spans across at least five of the six human-
In the recent work on the design of social drones, Baytas centered drone design concerns [2]. For instance, the ap-
et al [2] have analyzed the results and implications from peal concern reflects the affective component of psycholog-
an extensive set of research papers on social drones, hu- ical ownership [23, 24], and, arguably, its territoriality and
man drone interaction, and drone design. Based on this self-identity dimensions. The tactility concern seem to be
analysis, the authors developed a framework to enable end- likely to be related to territoriality and accountability dimen-
to-end, post-hoc characterizations of drone design studies. sions, the intuitive control and comprehension of drones is
The framework includes six drone design concerns, reflect- directly associated with the self-efficacy dimension and, po-
ing the specific design elements, and six human-centered tentially, with the autonomy dimension. Finally, the concern
concerns, which refer to the human responses evoked by of a perceived social role of a drone is, arguably, related
these elements. The six human-centered concerns identi- to the questions of specifics of self-identity, autonomy, and
fied by Baytas et al [2] include: accountability dimensions in the sense of ownership over
drones. Correspondingly, due to the breadth of the rep-
• ergonomics – whether people are physically comfortable resentation of ownership aspects in the human-centered
in interacting with the drone; drone design concerns, we suggest that the understanding
of the specifics of ownership over social drones is one of
• appeal – whether people are willing to accept, acquire,
the fundamental considerations for the drone design.
and/or use drones as designed;
• tactility – the degree to which people perceive the drone Conclusion and Discussion Points
as something they can touch, hold, and manually ma- In this position paper, we suggest that understanding of the
nipulate; sense of ownership over drones is one of the fundamental
questions in human-drone interaction, which affects the ma-
• intuitive control – the degree to which people are able to jority of user-centered concerns in drone design. We illus-
intuitively control the drone via the proposed design; trate how the specifics of drones, such as their autonomous
operation, ability to act as user’s proxy, and users’ tendency
• intuitive comprehension of a drone – the degree to
for anthropomorphization of drones, might bring unique as-
which people are able to interpret intentions or mes-
pects to different dimensions of psychological ownership.
sages that the drone is trying to convey; and
Furthermore, the investigation of the sense of ownership
• perceived social role of a drone – the existing conven-
over drones opens a research window into a broader set of
tions around social roles which people perceive as rele-
fundamental design questions. For instance, it leads to a
vant for drone behavior.
question of who is the user of a drone, in particular, when a
Building on the five dimensions of ownership suggested drone performs social actions in a distance (e.g. assisting in
for HCI [16], we argue that the question of ownership over rescue missions), and what differences should be reflected
in the interaction design for multiple users of a drone.
Thus, we would like to advocate the iHDI community to con- [6] Jessica R Cauchard, Jane L E, Kevin Y Zhai, and
sider the exploration of the mechanisms of drone owner- James A Landay. 2015. Drone & me: an exploration
ship, as we believe that it would bring an important angle to into natural human-drone interaction. In Proceedings
the understanding of the drone design and would allow to of the 2015 ACM international joint conference on
further advance the efforts put into structuring the design pervasive and ubiquitous computing. 361–365.
space for social drones.
[7] Jessica R Cauchard, Alex Tamkin, Cheng Yao Wang,
Luke Vink, Michelle Park, Tommy Fang, and James A
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