Autonomous vehicles (AVs) can enhance older adults’ mobility and independence, but also present significant safety and usability challenges. In a two-phase formative study, we examine older adults’ (aged 60+) unique design requirements in AVs and the potential of a conversational AI agent inside AVs to support as digital chauffeurs. Phase 1 focus group (N=10) findings present physical AV design with accessible interfaces. We conducted an interview study (N=18) in phase 2 using a virtual reality (VR) simulator and a large-language model (LLM)-powered chatbot. Findings reveal that older adults value conversational agents that could assist during emergencies, initiate social conversations and provide a sense of control and agency. Informed by the outcome, we discuss design implications, emphasizing the need for transparency, clear communication, and chauffeur-like interaction norms in AI agents with appropriate anthropomorphic characteristics (i.e., pacing, tone, and frequency) to ensure a comfortable riding experience for older adults.

We call attention to the challenges associated with Global South women’s safety in public transportation and investigate the potential of autonomous vehicles (AVs) in providing them with greater mobility and broader opportunities. In a mixed-methods study with Bangladeshi women (n=23), we explored their safety issues, including sexual harassment and assault, to inform AV design, especially for shared rides. Our focus group findings revealed women’s distressing experiences of abuse and undertaken safety measures in public transport of Global South. We conducted co-design sessions utilizing virtual reality (VR) scenarios and investigated participants’ perceptions of potential AV designs addressing unique safety concerns and transportation challenges. Participants suggested prioritizing their own safety, achieved through design justice of equitable AV, over the current, often ineffective, retributive justice. Our work contributes to AV design, ICTD, and feminist HCI by suggesting implications for designing community-based and culturally contextual transportation infrastructure for Bangladeshi women and similar other communities.

In the emerging automated vehicle (AV)—passenger interaction domain, there is no agreed-upon set of methods to design early concepts. Non-designers may find it challenging to brainstorm interfaces for unfamiliar technology like AVs. Therefore, we explore using an immersive virtual environment to enable expert and non-expert designers to actively participate in the design phases. We built AV-Sketch, an in-situ (on-site) simulator that allows the creation of automotive interfaces while being immersed in VR depicting diverse AV-passenger interactions. At first, we conducted a participatory design study (N=15) by utilizing PICTIVE (Plastic Interface for Collaborative Technology) to conceptualize human-machine interfaces for AV passengers. The findings led to the design of AV-Sketch, which we tested in a design session (N=10), assessing users’ design experiences. Overall, participants felt more engaged and confident with the in-situ experience, enabling better contextualization of design ideas in real-world scenarios, with improved spatial considerations and dynamic aspects of in-vehicle interfaces.

Lack of interfaith communication often gives rise to prejudice and group-based conflict in multi-faith societies. Nurturing this communication via interfaith learning may reduce this conflict by fostering interfaith empathy. HCI has a dearth of knowledge on interfaith coexistence and empathy building. To address this gap, we present the design, implementation, and usability of Cohabitant: a virtual reality (VR) application that promotes interfaith learning and empathy. Cohabitant’s design is theoretically underpinned by Allport’s intergroup contact theory and informed by insights from a participatory workshop we ran with members of three religious groups: Christians, Hindus, and Muslims. Our evaluation study, combining quantitative and qualitative data from 30 participants, suggests that Cohabitant may enhance general interpersonal empathy, but falls short for ethnocultural empathy. We discuss the possible design and policy implications of using this kind of VR technology for interfaith learning and empathy building.

With the introduction of autonomous vehicles (AVs) in real-world traffic, there are several human-computer interactions (HCI) challenges—especially how a passenger might interact with an AV where the human driver is absent. Riding inside an AV could be more challenging for older adults who are expected to be one of the largest user cohorts of AV. In this work, we conducted an interview session with senior participants (N=10) which allowed us to identify specific design needs for elderly passengers to have reliable communication with AVs. Based on the findings, we implemented five proof-of-concept prototypes in virtual reality (VR) and evaluated them through a user study with another group of elderly participants (N=15). Informed by the outcome, we discuss design insights for implementing inclusive interfaces inside the AVs that will be supportive of the functional abilities and cognitive needs of older adults to increase psychological driving comfort and perceived safety.

Online social media (OSM) has become an integral part of an individual’s daily life. The extensive computational power and decision-making ability of artificial intelligence (AI) and the proliferation of user-generated data on OSM have made the opinion one of the key emerging research areas. However, the ease of accessing, manipulating, and mining such user-generated data raises concerns about privacy and security, data and algorithmic biases and fairness. Nevertheless, their personal and societal implications are barely addressed. In this paper, we discuss the limitations, fairness, and biases introduced in data mining and the AI model development. Moreover, we describe the possible implications of using AI systems on users’ privacy and address future research directions to mitigate potential biases.

In the near future, mixed traffic consisting of manual and autonomous vehicles (AVs) will be common. Questions surrounding how vulnerable road users such as pedestrians in wheelchairs (PWs) will make crossing decisions in these new situations are underexplored. We conducted a remote co-design study with one of the researchers of this work who has the lived experience as a powered wheelchair user and applied inclusive design practices. This allowed us to identify and reflect on interface design ideas that can help PWs make safe crossing decisions at intersections. Through an iterative five-week study, we implemented interfaces that can be placed on the vehicle, on the wheelchair, and on the street infrastructure and evaluated them during the co-design sessions using a VR simulator testbed. Informed by our findings, we discuss design insights for implementing inclusive interfaces to improve interactions between autonomous vehicles and vulnerable road users.

Our work extends contemporary research into visualizations and related applications for automobiles. Focusing on external car bodies as a design space we introduce the External Automotive Displays (EADs), to provide visualizations that can share context and user-specific information as well as offer opportunities for direct and mediated interaction between users and automobiles. We conducted a design study with interaction designers to explore design opportunities on EADs to provide services to different road users; pedestrians, passengers, and drivers of other vehicles. Based on the design study, we prototyped four EADs in virtual reality (VR) to demonstrate the potential of our approach. This paper contributes our vision for EADs, the design and VR implementation of a few EAD prototypes, a preliminary design critique of the prototypes, and a discussion of the possible impact and future usage of external automotive displays.