Drawing From Social Media to Inspire Increasingly Playful and Social Drone Futures

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In this pictorial, we explore the potential of social media to help inspire ideas for future drone design applications that support playful and social experiences. Drawing from a Situated Play Design approach, we turn to social media posts to identify recurring playful and social instances of drone use in social settings. We present the results of collecting 143 posts found on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube, from which we identified a non-exhaustive list of drone-based play potentials, i.e. existing ways in which people already appropriate drones to playfully augment social situations. We present these play potentials as potentially valuable and inherently situated intermediate-level knowledge with generative power. We argue they might inspire the design of future drone technologies and experiences in Human-Drone Interaction (HDI), in directions that increasingly respond to people’s desires for play and social connection.