Designing Autonomous Car Cultures — A survey of the field 01
As we are getting ready for our upcoming ritual design sprint at Stanford d.school on autonomous cars, we are surveying the very active landscape on cars and culture and interaction design. Here are some of our first round of learnings.
Learning 1 — We will live in hybrid car cultures
The Society of Automobile Engineering created a taxonomy of autonomous cars based on the level of autonomy. According to this taxonomy, there are 5 levels. Level 0 corresponds to the existing cars, whereas level 5 is fully autonomous cars.
There’s real debate on when we can get to the level 5. Even level 5 cars could have arrived already, but the adoption of these cars will still take decades. For the foreseeable future, one can comfortably say that we will live in a hybrid world, where the car nation will be an amalgam of regular, semi-autonomous, and autonomous cars (as they are ready.)
Learning 2 — The projection of Autonomous cars becoming Home, Office, or Third places is still up in the air.
Cars are by default liminal spaces between, home, work, and third places. Future car concepts tend to promise a convergence of these spaces, thanks to the self-driving prophecy — where magical cars take care of every need.
Take the below two images from 1950s and 2015, offering very similar social settings where people relax and study while the car is taking care of the driving. In a sense, our collective imagination of autonomous car experiences hasn’t changed much. The unfolding realities might take a different path than our imagination.
Learning 3 — It’s not about technology but the human autonomy
One research that we found particularly resonating with our point of view is done by UsTwo — an innovation consultancy based in UK. The emphasis of their approach is human-first autonomy. They wrote a comprehensive book about their ongoing design & research work with the future of cars. Among their 21 design principles, we liked the “act human, be robot” and “mitigate concerns early.” Future cars need to be as reliable as a perfectly engineered machine, but they also need to interact with people in nuanced ways. And the cars will need to over-explain what is happening and reassure the riders, at early and regular intervals — to ensure they have a sense of perceived control.
Learning 4 — Innovation around autonomous cars will be about discovering the next sticky metaphor for control.
Early cars used to imitate a boat’s rudder, and over time that rudder evolved into today’s steering wheel. When Google designers talk about how they approached designing their Firefly car, they refer to the early days of an elevator control, and how it evolved and earned people’s trust. A similar evolution might be in the making for the autonomous cars. We liked how VW designers experiment with a horse’s reins metaphor to handover and takeover control of an autonomous car. We would love to see more playful concepts around autonomous control metaphors.
We will be posting more of our learnings from our survey of the field in the following weeks, along with our workshop findings. Stay tuned!
