Designing Perceived Safety in Autonomous Vehicles

Paper in proceeding, 2024

The perceived safety of Autonomous Vehicles (AV) is considered a major challenge towards their public acceptance. Here we explore the role of vehicle design in instilling a sense of safety on behalf of prospective passengers. Previous work showed that variations in exterior design affect people's perceptions although the particular design features driving these shifts in perception were not elaborated on. We aim to identify and validate the relative importance of design features pertaining not just to the vehicle exterior. The work contributes towards the development of a wider Data-Informed-Design (D-I-D) approach to assist designers to make mindful decisions, empower their creativity, and increase design efficiency and effectiveness by sizing or shaping the design space. Based on a series of semi-structured interviews with senior designers, we developed an initial taxonomy of design features. Their relative importance was subsequently validated in a forced-choice experiment in which a panel was asked to judge perceived safety of concept autonomous vehicles including particular design features. Preliminary results indicated that not all features had the intended effect suggestive of a “knowledge gap” on behalf of the designers indicating the potential benefits of a Data-Informed-Design approach.