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.

This chapter outlines and demonstrates a collaborative and interventional design anthropology of emerging technologies, through the example of autonomous driving (AD) cars. AD cars have been framed as solutions to everyday problems within proposals for platform-based future automated mobility systems. However when reframed through the lens of everyday local mobilities these industry driven future visions are revealed to be misaligned with the real priorities of people’s everyday lives. Thus showing how  revealing how the everyday present complicates dominant futures narratives. However, we emphasise that rather than stopping at this critique, we should productively collaboratively engage with city and automotive stakeholders in this field in pedagogies of mutual learning, experimentation, and creativity. To develop our discussion we draw on ongoing conceptualisation and research undertaken over a period of over six years.

One of the major challenges of user experience (UX) design in autonomous driving (AD) is to investigate the emerging expectations and needs of future passengers. Working with foresight into future interactions requires interdisciplinary collaboration that enables new modes of working. In our everyday work and throughout the sound interaction design process, we are often challenged by the lack of exploratory methodologies for involving human insights early on in the sound interaction design process. This chapter draws on the interviews with experts in sound design and UX domains, the research project, Sound Interaction for Intelligent Cars (SIIC), as well as daily product development work at the Volvo Car Corporation (VCC) to address this gap. We characterise what we call the classic approach to sound interaction design and outline methodologies used at different stages of the design thinking process for generating and translating UX insights into sonic interaction solutions. By this, we broaden the way of practicing participatory sound UX for AD development and respond to the challenge by incorporating existing exploratory design research methodologies, such as sensory ethnography, soundwalk, co-creation, ideation, and rapid prototyping. © 2022, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

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.

The relationship between design anthropology and Participatory Design (PD) has developed along a shared interest in understanding interventions and possible futures. In this full-day workshop, we use future-oriented participatory and collaborative methodologies to expand our understanding of how we might further develop ethnographies of the possible and how a focus on imagination and unspoken experience of the making and using of possible future scenarios can underpin our understandings. We also discuss how the experience of and engagement with possible futures can enable novel modes of research practice, knowing and understanding. © 2018 ACM.

This article outlines a novel way of performing experimental "Wizard of Oz" (WOz) User Experience (UX) research that specifically targets driving in different levels of self-driving modes. The reasons for exploring the possibilities of combining experimental and ethnographic WOz-testing have been twofold. On the one hand, this mixed-method approach responds to a growing body of critique concerning how the WOz test is biased by the claim that it explores real-life behaviour in an experimental setting. On the other hand, our approach also meets the demands for innovative research methodologies that can contribute to deeper understandings of how to better evaluate and account for human expectations and experiences when automated technologies become integrated in everyday life contexts. This knowledge is inevitable for a broader understanding of the overall user experience and expectations of autonomous driving and, more specifically, building an interdisciplinary collaborative testing approach.

Experimental ‘Wizard of Oz’ (WOz) User Experience (UX) research in the context of Autonomous Driving (AD) car development is becoming more interdisciplinary, human-centric and open to innovative methodological collaborations. In this paper, we demonstrate a mixed-methodological approach to research how people engage with and make sense of automated features that do not yet exist in everyday life contexts. We present how the combination of WOz testing and ethnographic ride-alongs have been developed and how the two different approaches can benefit from each other. We selected two everyday driving examples - emerging from T-junction and changing lane on the motorway - to demonstrate the value of mixing these methodologies. We propose that by building new collaborative test practices, we can create a more everyday-life oriented approach that better attends to people’s experiences, imaginaries and projections into possible futures of driving, which is particularly important to incorporate in AD vehicle design for mixed traffic environments. © 2018 Association for Computing Machinery.