Sprint 2: Robot You Can Drive My Car
Starting our engines with preliminary research and brainstorming
Welcome back to the second chapter of our journey, we’re excited to have you join us! From starting secondary research to making robot friends, the team has been busy at work deep diving into the problem space and exploring a broad possibility of domains. As we work to narrow our project scope, and begin to imagine the possibilities of what a telepresent attendant on a people mover could look like, here are some recent updates on what we’ve been up to:
Sprint One: Wrapping Up Kick-off + Next Steps
When we last left off, the team was gearing up for our final kick-off meeting with our lovely sponsors, Erin and Joan, at 99P Labs. With several fun, reframing, and assumption-examining activities, we were able to foster productive discussion about the project space and the expectations of the team moving forward.
To compile all of our personal takeaways and debrief on our meeting, we set aside time to collaboratively create an affinity diagram “debrief board,” full of personal takeaways and connected thoughts. This activity helped us reflect internally as individuals, and also reach a common understanding externally as a team. Here are some of the emerging themes that were uncovered during this activity:
Emerging Themes
- Design with the intent that the user journey takes precedent over the final product (medium, platform, etc.)
- Consider the physical element of attendants’ roles
- Understand existing behaviors and attitudes toward AI
- Examine how the context alters attitudes towards AI
- Account for a broad user base with a diverse set of needs
- Consider inclusivity & accessibility
- Recognize that a solution could come in many forms
After reflecting and analyzing our thoughts, we were left with a deeper understanding of the project space, but an even greater amount of questions to be answered. To prime ourselves for Sprint 2, as we begin to deep dive into our research, the team updated the research plan to jump straight into our first research methods: literature review and semi-structured interviews.
Sprint Two: Digging Into Research + Our Next Steps
We started off sprint two with secondary research, presenting to each other our key takeaways from prior research and studies that had been done in spaces related to our project such as:
- Human Acceptance and Trust of AI
- Autonomous Vehicles
- Human-Robot Interaction
- Public Transportation
- Haptic Feedback in Transit Environments
Next Steps
Throughout the rest of this sprint we are excited to be conducting informal interviews with experts and stakeholders in a broad range of fields related to our problem space. These participants include
- Professors studying ethics in robotics and AI
- Accessibility advocates
- Transit employees
- People in the autonomous vehicle industry.
We have also begun conducting observations in both public transportation settings and within analogous domains and are excited to explore these further. From self-checkout systems at grocery stores to automated PA systems, we are curious as to how people are already building trust with AI-enabled systems and non-human “attendants”.
We are excited to dig into pretotyping in our next sprint, and plan to make use of multiple modalities of attendants to start understand what form(s) are the most helpful to human passengers. Below you can see one of our first bodystorming exercises with one of our potential attendant forms. From robots, to web-based screens, to smart speakers, we plan to sample it all! Stay tuned to see how our research informs narrowing this scope over the next five months!
