Summary: Autonomous vehicles will have to coordinate their behavior with human road users such as drivers and pedestrians. The majority of recently proposed solutions for autonomous vehicle-to-human communication consist of introducing additional visual cues (such as lights, text and pictograms) on either the car's exterior or as projections on the road. We argue that potential shortcomings in the visibility (due to light conditions, placement on the vehicle) and immediate understandability (learned, directive) of many of these cues make them alone insufficient in mediating multi-party interactions in the busy intersections of day-to-day traffic. Our observations of real-world human road user behavior in urban intersections indicate that movement in context is a central method of communication for coordination among drivers and pedestrians. The observed movement patterns gain meaning when seen within the context of road geometry, current road activity, and culture. While all movement communicates the intention of the driver, we highlight the use of movement as gesture, done for the specific purpose of communicating to other road users and give examples of how these influence traffic interactions. An awareness and understanding of the effect and importance of movement gestures in day-to-day traffic interactions is needed for developers of autonomous vehicles to design forms of human-vehicle communication that are effective and scalable in multi-party interactions.

Recognizing that the movement of cars on the road involves inherently social action, Nissan hired a team of social scientists to lead research for the development of autonomous vehicles (AVs) that engage with pedestrians, bicyclists, and other cars in a socially acceptable manner. We are expected to provide results that can be implemented into algorithms, resulting in a challenge to our social science perspective: How do we translate what are observably social practices into implementable algorithms when road use practices are so often contingent on the particulars of a situation, and these situations defy easy categorization and generalization? This case study explores how our cross‐disciplinary engagements have proceeded. A particular challenge for our efforts is the limitations of the technology in making observational distinctions that socially acceptable driving necessitates. We also illustrate some of the significant successes we've already achieved, including the identification of road use practices that are translatable into AV software and the development of a concept, called the Intention Indicator, for how the AV might communicate with other road users. We continue to investigate road use to uncover and describe the ways in which the social interpretation of the world can enhance the design and behavior of AVs.

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The hallmark of service-value co-creation-is not easy to achieve in B2B IT service engagements. Typically, client and provider are both complicated organizational entities with multiple agendas and diverse stakeholders, and engagements often extend over years. We analyzed a number of IT service engagements to better understand their complex dynamics, with the ultimate goal of improving their outcomes. This paper reports on our study of how value co-creation unfolds over time, and identifies basic dynamics central to the modeling of service systems-actualization of service and realization of value-that are reflected in the proposed framework.

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