Automotive User Interfaces and Interactive Vehicular Applications

The Ethnographic (U)Turn:
Local Experiences of Automobility
Alex Zafiroglu, Tim Plowman, Jennifer Healey, David Graumann, Genevieve Bell, Philip Corriveau
Interaction and Experience Research Laboratory, Intel Corporation
2111 N.E. 25 th Avenue, Hillsboro, OR 97124-5961 USA
{alexandra.c.zafiroglu, tim.plowman, jennifer.healey, david.graumann, genevieve.bell, philip.j.corriveau}@intel.com
ABSTRACT
The Local Experiences of Automobility (LEAM) project creates
an ethnographic design space encompassing the car, the
infrastructure and the ecosystem around varied smart
transportation futures. This space is informed by locality and
context dependent conditions of how, when, and why cars are
used, by whom, and under what conditions. In this paper we
present the ethnographic methodology for a multi-country
exploration of driving experiences in Brazil, China, Germany,
Russia, and the United States using in car sensors such as GPS,
smart phone usage applications in concert with ethnographic
interviews and subject journaling.
Categories and Subject Descriptors
H.1.2 [User/Machine Systems]: Human Factors, Human
Information Processing
General Terms
Documentation, Design, Human Factors, Theory.
Keywords
Automobility, ethnographic research, sensors, GPS,
1. INTRODUCTION: A GRINDING HALT
After 100+ years of moving faster and further with cars, we are
beginning to grind to a halt. As more drivers exercise the
individual freedom to move about promised by car ownership, the
fruits of our “self-defeating quest for mobility” [1] surround us,
from Lady Gaga and William Shatner tweeting warnings about
Carmaggedeon in L.A., to 11 day, 100 km traffic jams in China, to
the proliferation of regulations like São Paulo’s Rodízio traffic
control to limit cars on the road by license plate number. The
dream of freedom of the road has given way to the unavoidable
reality that we need to think beyond our own four wheels if we are
to keep moving at all. We need to rethink what makes cars useful,
what makes a useable road and radically redesign what’s on our
roads in tandem with our transportation infrastructures.
Integrating advanced communications, services and sensors to
create ‘smart’ cars will not be enough; such a car will only be
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AutomotiveUI’11, November 29-December 2, 2011, Salzburg, Austria.
Adjunct Proceedings
- 47 -
useful in conjunction with smart roads supporting new systems for
resource use, commerce, regulation, taxation and surveillance.
A significant portion of current smart car and smart transportation
development focuses on making cars do what people don’t always
do well: pay attention, react quickly, multi-task, and make good
judgments [2]. Smarter cars are imagined as less dangerous,
highly-efficient users of time/space, and personalized to the
driver’s foibles. For example, Google’s self-driving car
specifically touts increased safety, gas efficiency and the potential
to put even more cars on the road (without gridlock). In its current
prototype, a car drives itself, sensing and reacting to the
environment, while sending queries, receiving, collecting and
sharing data with Google cloud services. It is a vision that funnels
our experience of mobility in the physical world through Google’s
cloud services.
But it’s also a remarkably undifferentiated vision. If Google could
start with a blank slate, the potential for rapidly building smart
transportation systems would be vast. While Google had a
relatively blank slate with the Internet and unencultured users –
for smart transportation, they and other builders must start with
100+ years of diverse trajectories of roads, regulations, and deeply
embedded local practices. While ubiquitous computing will
incrementally alter how we drive in the 21 st century, it cannot, and
will not do so uniformly. As Dourish and Bell [3] note, ubiquitous
computing is inherently messy, uneven, built as much on webs of
social values as on silicon.
2. FACING EXISTING CAR EXPERIENCES
HEAD ON
Building on findings from our recently completed Car Turn Outs
Project [4], and agreeing with Dourish and Bell on the
heterogeneity of ubiquity, we believe smart transportation will be
differently realized in various markets and will need to face the
complexity of existing car experiences head on. The basic
mechanics of how cars are operated are, to some degree,
universal. Yet cars, precisely because they are so integrated into
many peoples’ existence, are experienced in very localized ways
depending on the natural environment, the infrastructures of
roadways and traffic systems, including legal, regulatory, safety
and surveillance systems, as well as the social and cultural
milieus. The inclusion of advanced hardware and software in the
automobile platform will create the opportunity for even more
varied experiences in and around the car. Rather than isolating the
user from the landscape, as Urry [5] and de Certeau [6]
characterize automobility, the infusion of services and advanced
communication and sensing technologies into the car will create
the paradox of simultaneously more isolated and more grounded
experiences of mobility; more non-location-based information,