In this article, we interrogate the utility of conceptualising the ‘first and last mile’ (FLM) as a ‘challenge’ to be addressed through automated and integrated mobility services. We critically engage with the concept through a design anthropological approach which takes two steps so as: to complicate literatures that construct the FLM as a place where automated, service-based and micro-mobility innovations will engender sustainable modal choices above individual automobility; and to demonstrate how people’s situated mobility competencies and values, shape social and material realities and future imaginaries of everyday mobilities. To do so, we draw on ethnographic research into everyday mobility practices, meanings and imaginaries in a suburban neighbourhood in Sweden. We show how locally situated mobilities both challenge the spatial and temporal underpinnings of the first and last mile concept, and resist universalist technology-driven automation narratives. We argue that instead of attempting to bridge gaps in seemingly linear journeys through automated systems, there is a need to account for the practices, tensions and desires embedded in everyday mobilities. © 2023 The Author(s).

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 book roots the bringing together of ethnography and design firmly in social science theory, showing readers how to best use theory in design ethnography and how to develop a coherent relationship between research and practice. It promotes interdisciplinarity and collaboration, and takes design ethnography beyond the content of the 'project' to ask how it contributes to a wider agenda for a better world and the creation of ethical and responsible futures.

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

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.

In this chapter, we demonstrate how a design ethnographic approach to future algorithm-powered mobility solutions opens up possibilities to research social implications of automated decision making (ADM) from a situational perspective, by investigating the context of ADM rather than simply observing the technology itself and how it is used. The context of our discussion is one where the development of autonomous vehicles and artificial intelligence (AI) applications, in the service of transportation, has sparked a renewed research interest into shared mobility systems, and how these can respond to emerging challenges of rising traffic congestion and pollution levels. Our research addresses the gap between algorithm-based approaches to designing for optimizing, streamlining, and efficiency, the questions of how these systems and services are activated in people’s everyday life, and how they interfere with decision-making around traveling and shared mobility. We argue that to understand how these services and technologies will be adopted and implemented in society, research attention must be directed to people in real-life situations where this type of ADM operates.

Smart Cities have been around as a concept for quite some time. However, most examples of Smart Cities (SCs) originate from megacities (MCs), despite the fact that most people live in Small and Medium-sized Cities (SMCs). This paper addresses the contextual setting for smart cities from the perspective of such small and medium-sized cities. It starts with an overview of the current trends in the research and development of SCs, highlighting the current bias and the challenges it brings. We follow with a few concrete examples of projects which introduced some form of “smartness” in the small and medium cities context, explaining what influence said context had and what specific effects did it lead to. Building on those experiences, we summarise the current understanding of Smart Cities, with a focus on its multi-faceted (e.g., smart economy, smart people, smart governance, smart mobility, smart environment and smart living) nature; we describe mainstream publications and highlight the bias towards large and very large cities (sometimes even subconscious); give examples of (often implicit) assumptions deriving from this bias; finally, we define the need of contextualising SCs also for small and medium-sized cities. The aim of this paper is to establish and strengthen the discourse on the need for SMCs perspective in Smart Cities literature. We hope to provide an initial formulation of the problem, mainly focusing on the unique needs and the specific requirements. We expect that the three example cases describing the effects of applying new solutions and studying SC on small and medium-sized cities, together with the lessons learnt from these experiences, will encourage more research to consider SMCs perspective. To this end, the current paper aims to justify the need for this under-studied perspective, as well as to propose interesting challenges faced by SMCs that can serve as initial directions of such research.

New digital, automated and intelligent technologies and services – including self-driving cars, drones, smart home technologies, digital health applications and more – are becoming increasingly possible, available and integrated into everyday circumstances and imagined near and far futures. Investigating digital futures moreover demands research methods that surpass the conventional anthropological tendency to take refuge in the epistemological and ethical past. The term digital futures has the obvious connotation of being concerned with the roles played by technologies in a time that has not yet happened and is used across many contemporary contexts. Autonomous driving (AD) cars are a pertinent example of a technology in development. AD futures research therefore enabled our team to better understand – theoretically and ethnographically – how people imagined and experienced possible digital futures scenarios and how and why they began to feel confident and comfortable in these situations and when they did not.

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.