Anticipatory experience in everyday autonomous driving

Abstract

In this paper, we discuss how people’s user experience (UX) of autonomous driving (AD) cars can be understood as a shifting anticipatory experience, as people experience degrees of AD through evolving advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) in their everyday context. We draw on our ethnographic studies of five families, who had access to AD research cars with evolving ADAS features in their everyday lives for a duration of 1½ years. Our analysis shows that people gradually adopt AD cars, through a process that involves anticipating if they can trust them, what the ADAS features will do and what the longer-term technological possibilities will be. It also showed that this anticipatory UX occurs within specific socio-technical and environmental circumstances, which could not be captured easily in experimental settings. The implication is that studying anticipation offers us new insights into how people adopt AD in their everyday commute driving.

Atmospheric conditioning: Airport automation, labour and the COVID‐19 pandemic

“…Reclaiming what Lynch (2020a) calls "technological sovereignty," purposeful ground-up initiatives among users of automation can potentially drive techno-social reformulations in material ways, through alternative, counter-hegemonic (re)imaginations of technology. By constantly availing space for such experimentations -such as in the creative use of apps (Cockayne et al, 2017;Elwood & Leszczynski, 2018), anticipatory learning in autonomous driving (Lindgren et al, 2020), or the infusion of human aims and ideals in platform logic (Ruckenstein & Turunen, 2020) -labour and other consumers of automation can help disrupt "the abstract logics of digitization," challenging "hierarchies of technological knowledge and expertise" from below (Lynch, 2020b, p. 3). Such attempts at re-valuing technology is not always game-changing, but neither is it a wistful position of counter-hegemony.…”

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“…Accordingly, it is the shift from being a driver to a passenger that would provide one with opportunities for expanded movements and sensations, and this switch troubles the common view that passengering is a weak or secondary form of mobile subjectivity (Adey, Bissell, McCormack, & Merriman, 2012; Bissell, 2010). Indeed, one of the participants—the driver/passenger—in an AV study conducted by Lindgren, Fors, Pink, and Osz (forthcoming) is described as “very relaxed … took his hands off the wheel at a comfortable speed in standing queue in the left lane” (p. 11).…”

“…Across the globe in Singapore, AV experimentations also have their fair share of failures, such as the widely discussed media coverage in 2016 that a driverless car had collided with a lorry (Lin, 2016). These accidents, along with many unreported, trouble the discourses of safety and efficiency around AVs by bringing to the table a range of ambiguities, uncertainties and anxieties (see also Lindgren et al, forthcoming). With these competing narratives at play, how people perceive AVs and what they take autonomous technologies to mean could become more complex than what advocates of AVs have planned and might hope for.…”

Westdrive X LoopAR: An Open-Access Virtual Reality Project in Unity for Evaluating User Interaction Methods during Takeover Requests

“…What defines the user-friendly design of automated systems has been the subject of scientific discussion for decades [ 1 , 2 ]. Especially in the upcoming years, when automated vehicles of SAE (society of automotive engineers) automation levels 3 and 4 will emerge, the demands on the driver’s cognitive system will alter radically, as the role of humans as continuously active decision-makers in vehicles is replaced by automated systems [ 3 , 4 ]. Such techniques include the Audi traffic jam pilot [ 5 ] or Tesla’s full self-driving beta [ 6 ].…”