Week 1: preliminary work and literature review.
Introduction
The technology I wanted to focus on my FMP is autonomous vehicles. Currently there are examples of this type of cars you can find on some cities but it’s far from being fully implemented and it’s expected that it will take at least a decade for this to happen. But before they are implemented some researchers, designers and engineers are pointing at some issues that need to be addressed now.
One of these issues is trust. It’s expected that people won’t fully trust autonomous vehicles even if the technology that makes them function was ready. The public is sceptical of letting an autonomous vehicle drive them, as they feel they might be putting their lives at risk.
One of the principles of usability is that for people to trust one technology, this needs to be transparent: users need to know what the technology it’s doing, what state is in and what is trying to accomplish. This is when HCI and interfaces intervene.
The problem about this is that it’s likely going to be designed for abled people: people with functioning senses and full mobility. In an aim to mitigate the perpetuation of inequalities through technology, I wanted to approach inclusive design and design an interaction system for people with disabilities that will help them trust autonomous cars.
Research plan
Research : literature review
Next there’s some of the outcome of the literature review. The full list of this is included in the dissertation.
“Autonomous vehicle technologies have the potential to produce new – or perpetuate existing – forms of social inequality. Drawing from the insight that autonomous systems not only reflect but also refract unequal social relations between, across and within different social contexts.”
“(…) the general level of trust in automated or autonomous driving is limited, within the reviewed studies the majority of participants were concerned that self-driving vehicles cannot drive as well as human drivers”
“Self driving vehicles hold the potential to reduce inequalities and promote inclusion amongst drivers by allowing certain groups (senior citizens, non-drivers, and people with disabilities) access to automobiles that were limited, or unable to, previously”
“(…) there might be drivers with disabilities that may not be able to change the communication modalities if those are provided only using a unimodal interface. For example, if changing the modality is only possible via the visual interface, blind and partially sighted drivers will not be able to use it. Such a situation could be resolved by ensuring that all UIs are universally designed.”
In a way to start picturing what could I design for, I have defined a plausible future where users can book fully autonomous vehicles(AVs) by using their phones, just like every other car hiring service. In order to help disabled users trust AVs and the services that they can offer, they need to be transparent to users, and this can be accomplished through multimodal human-machine interfaces. Interfaces that go beyond visuals and sound and can adapt themselves to interact with disabled people. What I also proposed in this scheme is for disabled users to user their phones as identifier that AVs will recognise to reconfigure the way they deliver information about the actions they take. This would comply with the on the principles of usability: transparency.
Bibliography
European Comission, 2017. Literature Review On The Acceptance And Road Safety, Ethical, Legal, Social And Economic Implications Of Automated Vehicles. BRAVE - BRidging Gaps for the adoption of Automated Vehicles.
Furman, S., 2009. Building Trust. [online] usability.gov. Available at: <https://www.usability.gov/get-involved/blog/2009/09/building-trust.html> [Accessed 27 October 2020].
Ferati, M., Murano, P. and Giannousmis, G., 2017. Universal Design Of User Interfaces In Self-Driving Cars. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing.
Bissell, D., Birtchnell, T., Elliott, A. and Hsu, E., 2018. Autonomous Automobilities: The Social Impacts Of Driverless Vehicles. Current Sociology.