DESIGN BRIEF

THE PROBLEM

Autonomous cars have been argued as inevitable, but limited research has been done to see how people will react to and trust them.

THE AIM

SOLUTION

The solution is an autonomous vehicle taxi service (Thales Taxis) that takes passengers from their origin to their destinations. The service is paired with an app on their phone when booking the vehicle that allows the passenger to customize multiple aspects of the car and their journey.

How might we design autonomous car services that anticipate the individual driving preferences of a user and adjust driving parameters accordingly to maintain user trust in the service?

To create an autonomous car service that maintains the users trust through adjusting driving preferences in response to the user.

HOW THALES TAXIS CREATES TRUST

KEY FEATURES

The service is paired with an App on their phone when booking the vehicle that allows the passenger to customize any aspects of the car and their journey. For example, the scent (through diffusing differing essential oils for different moods, such as lavender for calming), the lighting, the music, the temperature, the route etc. This creates a comfortable environment that is a precursor to trust. There is a correlation between the state of mind and trust. The service offers standard features such as; the route, temperature, smell and music that can be adjusted free of charge. The service also offers premium features such as, the type of car, seat warmers, a refrigerator with food/ drink and the option to make stops.
There is a feature that can be activated which allows the user to understand what the vehicle is doing and why through either a screen or speech per the user's choice. Users are also able to gesture where the car should pull over. The car will have the ability to listen to both verbal and gestural instruction.
There is the possibility to set and save the user's common routes and settings. For example, the commuter can book through the same setting to save time and effort every day. As well as this, parents can set up continuous bookings to pick up their children from school saving time through their day not doing school runs. The parents will also receive notifications for each milestone in their child's journey in the car; such as when they have entered, are en-route and at the destination.
As well as this, a percentage of the cost for each ride will go to a charity of the users choice. The options for these charities differ each week to provide more options and perhaps raise awareness to smaller charities.

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MY ROLE

This project really benefitted from having an interdisciplinary team and our team worked effectively and cohesively, for example, the computer scientist understood the technology behind the autonomous car. As psychology is my core discipline, I was mainly tasked with understanding the user and the trust element. I was really able to use human-centred design and research in this project.

I conducted a large variety of initial secondary research that was user focused. I researched trust and psychological experiments conducted into trust extensively. I also researched artificial intelligence and how it is correlated to the human brain. Furthermore, I researched the applications of artificial intelligence such as its use in computer games.

After conducting extensive secondary research, my role was to create an initial survey and conduct formal and informal interviews testing some key insights gathered from our research. After conducting primary research, I put the new insights gathered into clusters. From here, it was clear that more research needed to take place. My role was to research ethics, ethics in autonomous cars, the trolley problem and the moral machine. Adding to this, I firstly researched peoples’ opinions on the ethics of autonomous cars and secondly why people trust and favor Airbnb’s over hotels. We then moved into the ideation phase. After shortlisting them via methods such as the business canvas, we were left with three main ideas.

I was very involved in both the generation of and shortlisting of our ideas. It was also my role to gather the final insights that informed our final idea. As well as this, I had to continuously consider the psychology of the user throughout this project and make sure the idea had features that created and maintained user comfort and trust. My role when prototyping and testing ‘ThalesTaxis’ was to create the prototype questions and interview members of the public testing our idea and gathering final insights. As a result of this, I highlighted the potential risk of our idea, which was cost. It was also my role to mitigate this risk. It was also my responsibility to consider the future possibilities of ‘ThalesTaxis’ and ensure that there were features of the idea that allowed it to become a sustainable business.

There were a number of challenges and unknowns faced in this project.

For example, research and insights into trust is bottomless, thus making it difficult to sift through incredible amounts of information. As well as this, there are many unknowns in regard to the ethics and moral decision-making in an autonomous car. A general consensus is not close to being found for how autonomous cars should act in an impossible situation. Adding to this, the technology involved in autonomous cars is very advanced and out of our realms of expertise. However, it is my opinion that these unknowns were successfully tackled and they were not major blocks in the project.