Week 7: project’s perspective shift and ideas materialisation.

This week I faced the challenge of coming up with ideas that targeted the different aspects that stemmed from my CoDesign sessions. This time, though, the perspective of my project had shifted a bit from what I wanted to do initially. At the beginning of this project I focused on the interaction part of using AVs transportation services for visually impaired people but based on the outcome I obtained from actually talking to my target users I realised that my contribution with this project could go beyond what I had initially planned. 

Earlier on my project I got a comment from tutor of mine saying that I was being technologically determinist, and now it’s easier for me to see why that was true. I was focusing too much on the characteristics of the technological devices that could be used for interacting with visually impaired people instead of the bigger picture of the experience. That’s the reason why I wanted to take a holistic approach of the AV mobility experience and design different elements and situations for all of it instead of just focusing on the interaction. 

Another factor that made me see that something in my project wasn’t going right was the fact that I was insisting too much on the future of technological capabilities, of which I have little control, as opposed of focusing on the visually impaired’s needs, behaviours and concerns. The former can be speculated about and many different ideas would come up and, by just looking about how technology has changed over the past ten years, we might expect them to change significantly in the next ten as well (which is when some scholar have speculated that AVs will take over). However, speculating about how visually impaired people might use AVs services seems a more fruitful approach from a user experience designer perspective; we shouldn’t design user’s needs or concerns, we should understand them.

What I did next was think of the different conclusions that came out from talking to visually impaired people and figure out a way of materialising them. My aim with the these sketches is to show how prototypes could portray the different features that came out during the CoDesign sessions.

The feature sketched above is ‘environment description’. In this, an AV would circulate around different roads and the voice assistant would describe the physical environment for visually impaired people, so they can use it safely. 

This sketch portrays a simple way of identifying the AV once it arrives to pick up the passenger. This feature was suggested by one participant int he CoDesign sessions and consists on letting a the user know by voice that the car has arrived to pick her/him up.

Finally, with this sketch I wanted to display the need of AV to be connected not only with other vehicles but also to other mobility and environmental actors so it can provide satisfactory experiences for visually impaired people.