A Collaborative Crowdsourcing Method for Designing External Interfaces for Autonomous Vehicles

TL;DR

This paper presents a scalable, human-centered crowdsourcing approach for designing external interfaces in autonomous vehicles, combining participant creativity with expert feedback to generate and evaluate innovative design concepts.

Contribution

It introduces a novel iterative participatory method that scales stakeholder engagement and integrates expert insights for autonomous vehicle interface design.

Findings

Popular design outperformed alternatives in interpretability and user experience.

Expert-validated innovations ranked second in performance.

Scalable participatory methods effectively generate and refine vehicle interface concepts.

Abstract

Participatory design effectively engages stakeholders in technology development but is often constrained by small, resource-intensive activities. This study explores a scalable complementary method, enabling broad pattern identification in the design for interfaces in autonomous vehicles. We implemented a human-centered, iterative process that combined crowd creativity, structured participatory principles, and expert feedback. Across iterations, participant concepts evolved from simple cues to multimodal systems. Novel suggestions ranged from personalized features, like tracking lights, to inclusive elements like haptic feedback, progressively refining designs toward greater contextual awareness. To assess outcomes, we compared representative designs: a popular-design, reflecting the most frequently proposed ideas, and an innovative-design, merging participant innovations with expert input. Both were evaluated against a benchmark through video-based simulations. Results show that the popular-design outperformed the alternatives on both interpretability and user experience, with expert-validated innovations performing second best. These findings highlight the potential of scalable participatory methods for shaping emerging technologies.