Shift Magazine - July 22, 2019 - 29

Students in the interaction
design program at the
ArtCenter College of Design
meet with representatives of
project sponsor Didi Chuxing
Technology Co. Students were
asked to design a vehicle to
solve a specific problem. In this
case, an AV to transport kids to
elementary school, shown above.

Waymo uses screens to tell
passengers what the self-driving
vehicle is doing, such as yielding
to pedestrians.

It's basically, in a nutshell, the design of the human experience
of connected or digital services."
ArtCenter students learn by making prototypes and models,
and testing them with people, Masilko said.
"It's really important in interaction design,
if you're designing some kind of complicated user experience, to do your best
research but then make it and try it and
learn from it," he said.
Masilko has taught a half-dozen
classes over the last few years on
the user experience in autonomous
vehicles, including some that have
been hosted by automakers concerned with what happens to their
brand or driving experience when
AVs are introduced.
Honda, for instance, which has a
long-standing relationship with the
ArtCenter, asked the school to help
imagine what it will mean to no longer be
a company focused on driving, Masilko said.
But the most fascinating example, he said,
involved Didi Chuxing Technology Co., known
informally as the Uber of China.
Didi sponsored a project that challenged Masilko's students
to propose a specific problem and design a vehicle to solve it.

Some students studied how autonomous ride-share vehicles could, in the case of an emergency, switch modes and get
their occupants to a hospital by cutting through traffic. Others
decided to investigate what it would take for parents
of elementary school students to let an autonomous vehicle take their children to and from
school every day.
"By getting really specific about it,
the students came up with a service that connects the family and
the school," he said. "They would
never have come up with this if
they didn't really think deeply
about actual, complicated, hardto-figure-out human needs."
Waymo's Powell said today's
AVs can be thought of like a Razr
flip phone from 15 years ago.
It was a reliable device that
allowed you to talk and send messages, but it was supplanted by
smartphones that can do so much more.
And now we can't imagine our lives without them. "We're now at a similar point with
[AVs] where it is early days, but I think in the not-toodistant future, it'll feel like something that's mainstream,"
he said. n

Today's
AVs can be
thought of like a
Razr flip phone from
15 years ago.

july 2019 * shift

Shift Magazine - July 22, 2019

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