Recharging Future Mobility : Understanding Digital Anticipatory UX through Car Ethnographies

Abstract: Cars have created many positive experiences for people by providing them freedom of mobility, exciting driving thrills and status in society. However, cars are also known to create problems such as pollution, traffic congestion and accidents. To shift towards a more sustainable way of mobility for the future, we need to understand car users' experiences of today and how these shape their anticipation of future mobility.Today users of new cars create their future car using immersive online car configurators, share their anticipation and experiences about the functionality of recent software updates on social media or consider how their future electric car could be charged in a ‘smart’-way through available charging ecosystems. These examples show how digitalisation through new digital technologies extend the ways users anticipate and experience cars as they evolve. These experiences go beyond the moment of in-car interactions, which so far has been the focus for user experience (UX) research and development within academia and industry.UX of digitalised cars is no longer mainly about the experiences of in-car driving and entertainment. Instead, digital technologies expand the possibilities for peoples' anticipation and UX of cars to emerge anywhere and anytime, making human anticipation an important aspect of UX to understand. The forward-oriented decision process, which occurs when people's hopes and fears about the future become part of their present actions and decisions, becomes a strong driver for people's decision making. Therefore, it becomes important to understand anticipation in relation to UX of digitalised cars and for how people shape their futures with cars.Digitalisation of traditional physical products enables a mix of the digital and physical representations of the product, which adds new challenges in how we can understand and research UX of digitalised cars to include more aspects than in the individual moment of physical use, such as people's experiences of anticipating cars. Consequently, my thesis intends to answer the question: How can experiences of anticipating digitalised cars be understood?I have approached the question by studying how digitalisation extends possibilities for UX and anticipation of cars to emerge in everyday life. To investigate the phenomena in everyday settings and follow change over time, a qualitative Design Ethnography (DE) approach was chosen and further developed throughout three different studies. The first study showed experiences of anticipation to be anticipatory, socially constructed, evolving and creating emotional experiences at an online car discussion forum. The second study demonstrated experiences of anticipating autonomous driving (AD) cars to be situated in the social and environmental context, influencing the instant, near and far time spans of people’s anticipation of AD. The third study revealed how electric cars as digital platforms enable people’s anticipation of cars to be related to the surrounding ecosystems. Thus, overall, the thesis consists of five papers that investigate people’s experiences of anticipating digitalised cars from different perspectives.This thesis’s main contribution is directed to UX research in the academic field of Human Computer Interaction (HCI) and the automotive industry. It aims to provide an understanding of how people’s anticipatory experiences of emerging digital technologies related to cars shape new problems and possibilities for future mobility. It concludes that UX research and design needs to be extended to also include aspects of digital representations, evolving functionality and extensions into other ecosystems, which enable the user’s anticipation to emerge and evolve. I have defined this as Digital Anticipatory UX (DAUX), which exposes how people’s anticipation continuously evolves through digi-physical use in the everyday context and creates experience before “use”. By showing a methodological approach to investigate these anticipatory experiences, this thesis also offers a starting point for understanding how people’s evolving hopes and fears can provide insights that implicate the creation of innovative future sustainable mobility solutions with people.