Understanding how attitudes towards autonomous vehicles can shape the design of cities

Abstract

Understanding public attitudes towards autonomous vehicles is an important starting point when designing and engineering future cities, both to ensure acceptance and to deliver social benefits. The GATEway project is a consortium of industry and academic organisations that are establishing a test bed for driverless vehicle technology within public streets in Greenwich, London. Each partner is using public trials to explore the potential for autonomous technology within a city transport network. The Royal College of Art (RCA) is exploring how public attitudes can be used to enhance social benefit. This paper shares the first findings from a series of workshops including people with additional needs, non-drivers, drivers, technology enthusiasts and professional stakeholders. The workshops delved into people's hopes and fears for driverless technologies and used co-design methods to explore how designers can respond when designing autonomous vehicles, the services they provide and the wider urban environment.