Tangles: Unpacking Extended Collision Experiences with Soma Trajectories
🤖 AI Summary
This paper challenges the conventional “collision-avoidance” paradigm in human–computer interaction, proposing instead that collision be reconceived as a core dimension of embodied interaction. Drawing on phenomenologically grounded soma design workshops, qualitative coding, and two empirical case studies—unintended human–drone collisions and cat-oriented robot design—the study introduces the “soma trajectories” model. This model conceptualizes collision as an extended, nine-stage experiential process encompassing consent, contact, ripple effects, and untangling. Crucially, it innovatively introduces the concept of “tangles”: dynamic, multi-agent entanglements of embodied trajectories that reframe collision not as failure but as relational co-constitution. The resulting framework offers analytical rigor, actionable design guidance, and ethical reflexivity. It advances novel paradigms for safe human–robot interaction, affective robotics, and ethics of coexistence.
Application Category
📝 Abstract
We reappraise the idea of colliding with robots, moving from a position that tries to avoid or mitigate collisions to one that considers them an important facet of human interaction. We report on a soma design workshop that explored how our bodies could collide with telepresence robots, mobility aids, and a quadruped robot. Based on our findings, we employed soma trajectories to analyse collisions as extended experiences that negotiate key transitions of consent, preparation, launch, contact, ripple, sting, untangle, debris and reflect. We then employed these ideas to analyse two collision experiences, an accidental collision between a person and a drone, and the deliberate design of a robot to play with cats, revealing how real-world collisions involve the complex and ongoing entanglement of soma trajectories. We discuss how viewing collisions as entangled trajectories, or tangles, can be used analytically, as a design approach, and as a lens to broach ethical complexity.
Problem
Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.
Explores collisions as extended human-robot interaction experiences.
Analyzes collisions using soma trajectories and key transition phases.
Investigates ethical and design implications of entangled collision trajectories.
Innovation
Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.
Soma trajectories analyze extended collision experiences.
Design approach views collisions as entangled trajectories.
Ethical complexity addressed through collision entanglement lens.
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