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Marius Hoggenmueller, Martin Tomitsch, Jessica Cauchard, Luke Hespanhol, Maria Lupetti, Ronald Schroeter, Sharon Yavo-Ayalon, Alexander Wiethoff, Stewart Worrall
Interaction Design and the Automated City - Emerging Urban Interfaces, Prototyping Approaches and Design Methods
Special Issue in the Open Access Journal on Multimodal Technologies and Interaction (MDPI), Basel, Switzerland

Ongoing advances in computing, sensing, and network technologies pave the way for the increasing introduction of autonomous cyberphysical systems in cities. These technologies, which include autonomous vehicles of various kinds such as driverless cars, ground robots, and drones, promise to transform urban mobility and automate services. However, a key to the successful uptake of autonomous vehicles is public acceptance and trustworthiness. This requires interaction designers and HCI researchers to define new interfaces that allow people to interact with those nonhuman agents, thereby considering aspects of usability and user experience, but also understanding the ethical and sociotechnical implications. For example, in the context of autonomous driving, researchers have begun to investigate the use of multimodal interfaces to enable communication between driverless cars and pedestrians. There is an increasing demand for new prototyping approaches to inform and evaluate near-future interfaces with both users and bystanders, as well as for design research methods to interrogate the roles and perspectives of nonhuman agents in cities.