In this paper, we argue that the electrification of cars is not simply a move from fossil fuel to electric energy. It also integrates the car into the household energy system in ways that challenge assumptions that car charging is made ‘smart’ primarily through AI-powered app-based digital services that help the user to make energy-, and cost-efficient decisions in terms of when to charge the car. As we will demonstrate in this paper, our design ethnographic study of how nine households learn to charge their cars according to their family routines and values shows how smart charging is not merely due to specific technological features. Instead, charging habits evolve through anticipatory experiences of what smart technologies come to mean to family members through their use. Based on our research, we recommend a smart charging service design that affords multi-operation ability, co-learning ability and social accessibility. © 2023 29th Annual Americas Conference on Information Systems, AMCIS 2023. All rights reserved.

Emerging technologies—such as autonomous driving (AD) cars, blockchain, robotics, and drones—are increasingly part of popular narratives and industry and policy agendas. They are commonly understood as new digital, data-driven, intelligent, or automated technological innovations in development, or at the cusp of being launched into a market. Thus, the anthropological question of how they might become part of everyday, experiential, possible worlds demands our attention. In this chapter we outline an approach to emerging technologies that is rooted in design anthropology and takes an interventional stance. In doing so we situated design anthropology of emerging technologies within an interdisciplinary field which has tended to be dominated by technologically determinist approaches. Through the example of the notion of trust in AD cars, we show how policy, industry, engineering, and social science approaches configure to provide different and critical understandings. Drawing on our own design ethnographic research, we show how design anthropological attention to people offers an alternative and viable mode of understanding how emerging technologies become part of emerging worlds. © 2022 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.

As machines become increasingly intelligent, the HCI community is presented with new challenges regarding methods to capture and understand user experience (UX). In the case of autonomous driving (AD), this involves new scenarios where humans and intelligent vehicles need to act together in real-life traffic situations with other road users. This article responds to this context by 1) outlining a longitudinal design ethnography method whereby participants drove semiautonomous cars in their everyday environments to capture such human-machine relations in real-life settings, 2) demonstrating the complexities of the relations between humans and AD vehicles, 3) engaging theories of socio-materiality and entanglement to understand the human-machine relations of AD cars, and 4) identifying anticipatory experiences that emerge from these relations and their implications for informing UX design. © 2021 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC

The transition towards electric vehicles (EV)s is rapidly increasing, and the automotive industry has been busy exchanging to electric engines. However, electrification of cars is not only about hardware, but it also implies a digitalisation of cars. Charging and maintenance of EVs is enabled through digital platforms. Little is known of how this digitalisation of cars affect people’s everyday lives. What happens when the car moves from being simply a machine that provides means for transport, but also becomes a power source and a sensor platform with computing capacity powered with AI driven technologies that is controlled via digital platforms? In this article, we present findings on how people experience and learn to live with EVs in their everyday life. We argue that ethnographic understandings of EVs as evolving digi-physical phenomena provide opportunities to foresight how to implement EVs from a people-centric perspective.

The transition towards electric vehicles (EV)s is rapidly increasing, and the automotive industry has been busy exchanging to electric engines. However, electrification of cars is not only about hardware, but it also implies a digitalisation of cars. Charging and maintenance of EVs is enabled through digital platforms. Little is known of how this digitalisation of cars affect people's everyday lives. What happens when the car moves from being simply a machine that provides means for transport, but also becomes a power source and a sensor platform with computing capacity powered with AI driven technologies that is controlled via digital platforms? In this article, we present findings on how people experience and learn to live with EVs in their everyday life. We argue that ethnographic understandings of EVs as evolving digi-physical phenomena provide opportunities to foresight how to implement EVs from a people-centric perspective. © 2022 IEEE Computer Society. All rights reserved.

Cars have created many positive experiences for people by providing them freedom of mobility, exciting driving thrills and status in society. However, cars are also known to create problems such as pollution, traffic congestion and accidents. To shift towards a more sustainable way of mobility for the future, we need to understand car users' experiences of today and how these shape their anticipation of future mobility.

Today users of new cars create their future car using immersive online car configurators, share their anticipation and experiences about the functionality of recent software updates on social media or consider how their future electric car could be charged in a ‘smart’-way through available charging ecosystems. These examples show how digitalisation through new digital technologies extend the ways users anticipate and experience cars as they evolve. These experiences go beyond the moment of in-car interactions, which so far has been the focus for user experience (UX) research and development within academia and industry.

UX of digitalised cars is no longer mainly about the experiences of in-car driving and entertainment. Instead, digital technologies expand the possibilities for peoples' anticipation and UX of cars to emerge anywhere and anytime, making human anticipation an important aspect of UX to understand. The forward-oriented decision process, which occurs when people's hopes and fears about the future become part of their present actions and decisions, becomes a strong driver for people's decision making. Therefore, it becomes important to understand anticipation in relation to UX of digitalised cars and for how people shape their futures with cars.

Digitalisation of traditional physical products enables a mix of the digital and physical representations of the product, which adds new challenges in how we can understand and research UX of digitalised cars to include more aspects than in the individual moment of physical use, such as people's experiences of anticipating cars. Consequently, my thesis intends to answer the question: How can experiences of anticipating digitalised cars be understood?

I have approached the question by studying how digitalisation extends possibilities for UX and anticipation of cars to emerge in everyday life. To investigate the phenomena in everyday settings and follow change over time, a qualitative Design Ethnography (DE) approach was chosen and further developed throughout three different studies. The first study showed experiences of anticipation to be anticipatory, socially constructed, evolving and creating emotional experiences at an online car discussion forum. The second study demonstrated experiences of anticipating autonomous driving (AD) cars to be situated in the social and environmental context, influencing the instant, near and far time spans of people’s anticipation of AD. The third study revealed how electric cars as digital platforms enable people’s anticipation of cars to be related to the surrounding ecosystems. Thus, overall, the thesis consists of five papers that investigate people’s experiences of anticipating digitalised cars from different perspectives.

This thesis’s main contribution is directed to UX research in the academic field of Human Computer Interaction (HCI) and the automotive industry. It aims to provide an understanding of how people’s anticipatory experiences of emerging digital technologies related to cars shape new problems and possibilities for future mobility. It concludes that UX research and design needs to be extended to also include aspects of digital representations, evolving functionality and extensions into other ecosystems, which enable the user’s anticipation to emerge and evolve. I have defined this as Digital Anticipatory UX (DAUX), which exposes how people’s anticipation continuously evolves through digi-physical use in the everyday context and creates experience before “use”. By showing a methodological approach to investigate these anticipatory experiences, this thesis also offers a starting point for understanding how people’s evolving hopes and fears can provide insights that implicate the creation of innovative future sustainable mobility solutions with people.

A growing body of Human-Computer-Interaction research and the automotive industry has identified that un- derstanding user needs and creating positive user experience (UX) is crucial in order to successfully introduce Autonomous Driving (AD) vehicles to the market. AD research is commonly undertaken to provide user insights by studying the individual-technology experiences in lab settings or by forecasting attitudes and acceptability through large surveys. However, these approaches base their knowledge on people’s past or present expectations and limited real life experiences of AD. To better understand upcoming individual user needs and to enable new innovations beyond acceptability forecasts and UX lab tests, we need to identify new concepts through alter- native methodologies that can generate user foresights based on users’ evolving anticipations of AD in their everyday lives. We propose an ethnographic approach with iterative speculative scenarios, which we demon- strate through a study undertaken with participants from five families who were introduced to evolving levels of AD, in real-life situations. To demonstrate the methodology, we draw on empirical findings which reveal anticipatory experiences, which we abstract through the concepts of confidence, hope and being-in-the-moment. We show how these concepts structured our user foresights, and outline the implications of engaging them in innovation processes.

This chapter explains how designing for future intelligent mobility systems is advanced by a human-centered approach, based in design anthropology. It provides an accessible introduction the theory and methodology of this approach, the production of ethnographic insights, and their translation into design probes for use workshops tailored to enable stakeholders to actively co-design future mobility and autonomous vehicle services and outlines the potentials and challenges of engaging diverse stakeholders—from industry and policy to the people who will use future technologies and services—in the development of future mobility. © 2021, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

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 1ó 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. © 2020, The Author(s).

In this article we demonstrate how design anthropology theory, methodology and practice can be mobilised to create interventions in how possible human futures with emerging technologies are understood and imagined. Drawing on our research into Human Experience and Expectations of Autonomous Driving (AD) cars we show how: we engaged ethnographic insights to redefine concepts of trust and sharing which contest dominant problem-solution narratives; and we mobilised these insights in applied contexts, through our AD Futures cards which employ ethnographic quotes and examples to disrupt common assumptions, align stakeholders with everyday experience, and pose new questions. © 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.