Sven Krome

Experiencing Autonomous Vehicles: Crossing the Boundaries between a Drive and a Ride

Autonomous vehicles have gained attention recently since research organizations and companies have presented (semi-) autonomous vehicles driving in public traffic. This workshop covers the crossover between driving/riding in (semi-) autonomous vehicles and user experience (UX) research. The focus lies in an in-depth discussion on challenges and potentials for UX in autonomous vehicles. We will explore various areas such as, user experience factors, interaction design issues, entertainment potentials, social driving, and methodological issues. Additionally, we envision building a bridge between the automotive community and the human-robot-interaction community, since we believe autonomous vehicles can be regarded as a very specific kind of a robot. The overall aim of the workshop is to discuss the future landscape for research within and across each of these areas.

A context-based design process for future use cases of autonomous driving: prototyping AutoGym

Autonomous cars are on the horizon, meaning passengers will no longer have to focus on driving leaving them with extra time for other activities, or engagements. However, research has focused primarily on safety related aspects of autonomous driving, overlooking the need to design for this new free time. This raises the question, how do we design new interactive experiences for the future of autonomous cars? In this paper, we present a design process derived from our research-through-design approach to explore possible everyday use cases of autonomous driving from an experience-focused perspective. We report details of the four methods that constituted, and influenced our design process and led to the creation of AutoGym, an exertion interface with context-based interactions suitable for future car-based commuting. The contribution is twofold: Foremost, our design process suggests guidelines on how to design and simulate future use cases of what we assume will constitute the autonomous driving experience. Secondly, we aim to inspire automotive user experience designers to pursue a context-based design approach by leveraging situational features which support experiences that are tailored and unique to autonomous driving.

2nd Workshop on User Experience of Autonomous Driving

Autonomous Driving has gained attention from academia and industry over the last decades. Research organizations and companies have developed (semi-) autonomous vehicles and first in-situ studies have been conducted. This workshop follows last years first AUI workshop on user experience (UX) and autonomous driving (AD). We would like to widen the conversation on UX and AD based on the results from last year. The focus lies in an in-depth discussion on challenges and potentials for UX and AD among experts and researchers. We will explore various areas such as methodological issues, human factors, entertainment, social driving, and novel user interface approaches. The overall aim of the workshop is to discuss the future landscape for research within and across each these areas.

HCI and Autonomous Vehicles: Contextual Experience Informs Design

The interaction between drivers and their cars will change significantly with the introduction of autonomous vehicles. The drivers role will shift towards a supervisory control of their autonomous vehicle. The eventual relief from the driving task enables a complete new area of research and practice in human-computer interaction and interaction design. In this one-day workshop, participants will explore the opportunities the design space of autonomous driving will bring to HCI researchers and designers. On the day before workshop participants are invited to visit (together with workshop organizers) Google Partnerplex and Stanford University. At Google participants will have the opportunity to explore Googles autonomous car simulator and might have the chance to experience one of the Google Cars (if available). At Stanford participants are invited to ride in a Wizard-of-Oz autonomous vehicle. Based on this first-hand experience we will discuss design approaches and prototype interaction systems during the next days workshop. The outcome of this workshop will be a set of concepts, interaction sketches, and low-fidelity paper prototypes that address constraints and potentials of driving in an autonomous car.

Contextual Inquiry of Future Commuting in Autonomous Cars

Millions of people consider their car-based commuting a daily hassle. Autonomous car technology promises a relief from driving related stress and may change the commuting experience fundamentally. So far, research in this field has mainly been focused on commuting in manually driven cars or on usability and safety issues of specific driver automation technologies. In order to explore how to design activities and entertainment for future commuting in fully autonomous cars, we conducted a contextual inquiry inspired field study with three car-based commuters in an improvised autonomous car. This paper introduces our research setup and presents preliminary findings. It contributes to the exploration of the design space of autonomous driving in two ways: (1) the paper describes a pragmatic approach to adapt a contextual inquiry for the exploration of future use cases of autonomous driving and (2) it also articulates design implications and temporal frames derived from our first set of user studies that we regard as essential for designing context-sensitive entertainment in future cars.

AutoPlay: Unfolding Motivational Affordances of Autonomous Driving

The AutoPlay prototypes have been designed to explore the implementation of non-driving activities into the context of a future autonomous driving situation. The conceptual design goal was to maintain a pleasurable situational awareness of the inactive driver by integrating the driving context as a meaningful input into the interaction system. In this chapter, we introduce the design of three experimental applications for autonomous driving and report on explorative user studies conducted to investigate the impact of the three AutoPlay prototypes: AutoGym, an in-car exertion game that translates car speed and traffic situations into an individual exercise program. AutoJam, a touch sensitive steering wheel cover to generate interactive music experiences in a creative interplay with car’s driving dynamics. AutoRoute, a discovery application for future urban commuting in autonomous cars that enables an exploration of the city based on spontaneous routing and rerouting. Furthermore, we reflect on the outcome of the user studies and propose three motivational affordances of autonomous driving: drivability, performability, and explorability. Each of these concepts, help to understand the motivational possibilities of the autonomous driving situation and facilitates a meaningful alignment of interaction systems and the driving context. We discuss the underlying concepts of the three affordances by relating them to the experiences identified in the user studies. Subsequently the contribution of this chapter is twofold: (1) We introduce the AutoPlay prototypes as inspirational concepts for aligning non-driving activities with the autonomous driving context and (2) we propose three motivational affordances as design targets for the implementation of non-driving activities in order to initiate a broader discussion on the pleasures of autonomous driving beyond instrumental motives.

AutoJam: Exploring Interactive Music Experiences in Stop-and-Go Traffic

AutoJam is an interactive music listening experience played on an inactive steering wheel of an autonomous car. By designing AutoJam, our aim was to make in-car music interactive and align music creation with the progression of the traffic situation. Besides being a fun and creative activity for frustrating stop-and-go traffic, AutoJam helps to understand the building blocks of in-car performances. In order to explore the impact of AutoJam, we conducted an in-situ user study with 14 participants. From the findings, we constructed a map of experiential dimensions of AutoJam and found that players experience, constitute itself through a continuous shifting between those dimensions. Reflecting on this process, we discuss four building blocks of in-car performances. Ultimately, this work aims to frame autonomous driving in difficult traffic as a creative and playful activity promoting situational awareness and musical expression.

AutoGym: An Exertion Game for Autonomous Driving

In-car exercises are a promising way to keep the inactive driver of future autonomous cars in good shape and alert of the situation around them. To explore how to implement exercises into the car context, we designed AutoGym, an in-car fitness program that translates frustrating traffic into a fun exertion game. To progress in the game, the players must anticipate changes to the traffic situation they are exposed to in the car and work-out against their prediction. In this paper, we present the conceptual design of AutoGym and report what we have learnt from an explorative user study with 28 participants. Furthermore, from the design process and the evaluation, we derived three strategies for implementing exertion games. We found that these strategies helped to conceptualize exertion games as a playful embodiment of the dynamics of driving and as such, can positively influence the experience of control, orientation and situational awareness i.e. experiential factors that can be crucial for facilitating future autonomous driving in a pleasurable and safe way.

Design-led exploration of indoor parking: an industry perspective

For many people, parking in large indoor venues can be a challenging and demanding task. Advanced positioning technologies and accurate indoor maps offer technical solutions for developing an indoor navigation system that helps drivers with the challenges of indoor parking. However, in order to develop a meaningful indoor navigation system, we first need to understand the experiential context of indoor parking. To do so, we investigated the indoor parking experience through explorative studies and design-led explorations. In this paper, we present the design process and the prototyping activities involved to gain an understanding of the indoor parking context. Furthermore, we reflect on how design-led research has helped us to iteratively reframe the research question and we present some of the relevant findings to inspire future academic or industrial research on this topic.

Workshop on Navigating Autonomous Cars: The Opportunities of HD Maps on User Experience

In this half-day workshop, we explore the opportunities of live (or real-time) high-definition (HD) maps for the user experience of autonomous driving. To date, HD maps tend to be optimized for machine-readability, enabling autonomous driving systems to anticipate upcoming maneuvers. In our workshop, we want to unfold the possibilities of HD maps as a rich source for novel driving experiences, in-car entertainment or innovative location-based services. We will ideate, prototype and discuss new, radical or provocative user experiences that are grounded in the contextual, real-time datasets provided by HD maps. The outcome of the workshop will be twofold: first, an agenda for future research projects based on ideated use cases and job-stories of HD maps. Second, we will conceptualize a diverse range of sketches, storyboards or (paper) prototypes enabling a hands-on exploration of future driving experiences with HD maps.