Autonomous Vehicle Study Builds Bridges between Industry and Academia

Abstract

Researchers have long explored the desirability and benefits of industry‐university collaborations and acknowledge they can be fraught with difficulties. We examine one such alliance, focused on driverless cars, a current hot topic in the public imagination and in technology design. Our collaboration began as an alliance between two anthropologists, one a professor at the University of North Texas, the other a consultant with the Nissan Research Center in Sunnyvale, California. We designed a research project for a design anthropology course that Christina Wasson taught in Fall 2014. Brigitte Jordan, at the time, was conducting an informal ethnography class for engineers and computer scientists at NRC. Our alliance had two objectives: to determine what a successful industry‐university collaboration could look like when it involves ethnographic research in the high‐tech sector, and to provide insights into usable ethnographic methods and data that would support social and cultural questions in autonomous vehicle (AV) research at the Nissan center. We found these two geographically separated classes eventually allowed building bridges across academia and industry, anthropology and engineering, leading in the long run to some softening of the boundaries between the two disciplines. Here we discuss significant variance in the research cultures of class participants at UNT and NRC (ethnographers and automotive engineers), and the various manners in which these differences were bridged over the course of the project (or not, as the case may be). We explore factors which inhibit or encourage exchange between university and industry micro‐cultures, consider reasons for the success or failure of such projects, and offer suggestions for improving future collaborations. We end with ideas about what a model for productive industry‐academia collaboration could look like.

The Rise of the User and the Fall of People: Ethnographic Cooptation and a New Language of Globalization

“…To understand how the rise of UX represented a departure from earlier forms of ethnographic praxis in industry, we must look back at some of its history. EPIC remains a Rise of the User and the Fall of the People -Amirebrahimi 73 pivotal sight at which many of these origin stories are recounted in great detail, revealing the vast array of work anthropologists outside of the academy have accomplished over the years from scoping the possibilities of digitally collaborative work environments (Churchill 1998); to rethinking the practice and implementation of large healthcare systems (Darrouzet 2009); to mapping the future of the entrepreneur with socially distributed micro-jobs (Cefkin, Anya, and Moore 2014); to influencing the shape of a future of ubiquitous computing (Dourish and Bell 2011); to arguing for a more design-oriented ethnographic praxis (Salvador, Anderson, et al 1999), to rethinking autonomous transportation (Brigitte and Wasson 2015), to driving more culturally sensitive corporations (Ortlieb 2010). As the list goes on, so too does our work continue to expand horizons and push theoretical and institutional boundaries.…”

Design Anthropology

“…Today's design anthropology emerged most directly from work at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), where a group of anthropologists and others "pioneered the use of ethnographic methods to understand how users interact with computers and related technologies" in the 1980s and 1990s (Wasson andSquires 2012:258, Suchman 1987). Through personal and professional connections, this approach dif-Paulson, S., & Gezon, L. L.…”

“…Logan McLaughlin conducted his thesis research in summer 2015 through an internship at the Nissan Research Center -Silicon Valley (NRC-SV), a lab at which self-driving cars are being developed (McLaughlin 2016). Logan's project built on research that my design anthropology class conducted for NRC-SV in fall 2014 (Jordan and Wasson 2015). Logan joined NRC-SV's Human Understanding in Design (HUD) team, which included anthropologists Melissa Cefkin and Brigitte Jordan.…”

“…At the Nissan Research Center in Silicon Valley, one of the places where AVs are being developed, a well-known roboticist said to an anthropologist: "Robotics is easy. What's difficult is the human stuff" (Jordan and Wasson 2015).…”

On the Road with an Autonomous Passenger Shuttle

“…To date, most research has been conducted in laboratory settings using prototypes, future scenarios, and in some cases onsite at test facilities [20]. However, as AVs move from test facilities to public roadways, researchers now have an opportunity to investigate Human-AV interaction in real world traffic situations [1,11,23,24].…”