Systems level human centric design: ignore emotions at your peril

Guest author Clive Hartley, Quarterre Studios

The first wave of self-driving vehicle designs were heralded as being user-centric by design, an innovation that would free up drivers to be.... well busy doing something else while being passengers (curiously, this often seemed to involve doing more work). Generally, they were presented as evolutions of the private car.

More recently, the most promising formats for automated vehicles seem to be those that are much closer to public transport vehicles, small pods or shuttles operating in many different scenarios. I’ve heard them nicknamed “trackless trams”, which succinctly implies their benefits in public transport systems, especially running 24/7 as a flexible, sustainable service in a rural area.  

However, without a driver, there’s a new challenge about the relationship with users. I’m going to switch now to talking about human-centric design as distinct from user-centric. Human centred design works on two levels: the practical and the emotional. If you want people to use public transport because you want to reduce emissions and reduce road casualties, you need to think about the emotional levers, the aspects of your transport system that will persuade people to choose lower carbon ways of getting around. Those levers are many and varied, cultural, unconscious, and work at both the individual and collective level. Let’s explore some of those emotional levers.

For example: I had an interesting discussion with somebody recently who suggested that AVs could be built cheaper if you didn’t have windows in them. But if you get on a bus with kids, where do they want to sit? Always upstairs at the front, because that’s the best view! It’s a neat example of how intrinsically important being able to see where we are is to us. In the recent study by CCAV of public perceptions of AVs, they observed that if passengers couldn't see in front of them and the vehicle stopped suddenly, their anxiety levels went through the roof. If they could see what’s happening outside, they could understand and anticipate the situation far more easily.

Some designers might believe you can replace a window with a screen, a person with remote video link, or even an avatar, or that you really don’t need a driver or a concierge on board if the passengers can access all the necessary information via a smart interface but there are lots of subtleties to this.   

Firstly, I think this is a gamble with percentages, because there will always be some people who need and want to be able to interact with another human in person.

Post-pandemic, we are increasingly used to having face-to-face conversations when we’re not in the same room. But where it starts to get messier and trickier for designers of services is when you lose any visual input, when you’re not sure if you are dealing with a person or a chat bot. You're not sure how much it understands, or how much it's relying on stock phrases, this introduces fear. Once of the interesting abilities of Large Language Model AIs, such as Chat GPT is how naturally you can communicate with a machine. Something that has obvious benefits for the passengers of AVs.

And yet... not everyone will be able to use these synthetic systems and that poses potentially big problems, especially in a crisis when passengers are in a panic. Voice based systems suddenly don’t understand what you're saying because you've got a strong accent, there's a lot of background noise, you’ve been injured or can’t breathe properly. Or the artificial voice issuing information or instructions simply isn’t convincing or calming. We are seeing a lot of these issues coming to the fore in the big discussion around the closure of ticket offices in railway stations. All of a sudden people are becoming very aware of all those situations where you need to be able to communicate and interact with another person. These are edge case scenarios, unlikely but important situations, in which people need to know that another person understands their predicament and has empathy for their fear. The design of driverless public transport services absolutely needs to tackle human feelings. Whether you’re a passenger in a trackless tram or a rider of a personal micromobility device, similar emotional considerations can make or break the success of a product or service.

My second point about designing an appropriate interface between a service and human is more about culture. I read recently of some fascinating research by ?What If! into in-car avatars or in-car virtual assistants. It showed that most people in Europe really didn’t want their car to have a virtual personality; that the car is seen as a projection of their own personality and not something distinct from them. However, if you go to the Far East, people are much more accepting of inanimate objects having spirits and souls – it’s one of the beliefs of Shinto, Japan’s indigenous religion. Whereas in the west, we have almost been pre-conditioned by Hollywood that all things robotic are intent on destruction of the human race, to be feared and unplugged.

These sorts of cultural differences are going to become really important when it comes to details, such as how people ask questions (rising or falling intonation), if, when and how to apologise, or say please and thank you. These differences are evident if you compare the UK to Denmark or Germany. They are also different in Glasgow and Gravesend.

For a human-centric mobility service to be as inclusive as possible is going to be really difficult. To achieve the highest percentage, we have to start looking at systems and not just vehicles, and accept that if a public transport system as a whole is 100% accessible, it's perhaps acceptable that some parts, or some modes within it that are not 100% accessible, because there are alternatives for users within the system. For example, not everyone can use the Santander bikes, but that's just one part of London’s transport system.  

I think it's easy, potentially, to make trackless trams highly accessible on a purely practical level. But that’s only part of the story.

One of the commonest complaints about all forms of public transport is frequency – both a lack of regular service, and the frustration with not being able to anticipate the availability of the service. Frustration: we are talking about emotions again! If trackless trams are cheaper and more flexible to run as a system, it’s highly likely these frustrations will disappear, and if spontaneous travel is highly accessible, then public transport is more likely to become the first choice for more people. Connect the trackless trams within a system via a mobility hub which offers additional services like parcel lockers and so on, and the system then as a whole is really working for the community it serves.

So the point here is that an accessible future is predicated not only on human-centred vehicle and service design, but also on human centred system design. Emotions play a huge, and largely unrecognised part in system design.

This is really well illustrated by the seminal work of the Danish architect Jan Gehl who researched how far people were willing to walk within cities. It should come as no real surprise that the nicer the surroundings, the further people are willing to walk. So the system design, in this context, includes the walk to the nearest transport mode.

Transport system designers ignore emotions at their peril. People feel things very quickly, even before they've rationalised them, and therefore you have to understand and take into account how people will feel about things in the design of them. At the level of vehicle design, this ought to be straightforward, but I think a lot of vehicle designers are mis-reading the room. People naturally see faces in everything. So the styling of headlamps, radiator grills and so on is crucial when it comes to making vehicles for public transport that are welcoming and attractive. Now scale this up. In London, the black cab and the Routemaster bus are the embodiment of the London brand. People have an emotional connection to that brand. Any new form of mobility needs to fit in with it, to become part of people's mental image of the system and the city. Who wants to live in a town where everything that drives down the street looks battle-ready or like it came out of a Judge Dredd movie?

Human-centred design needs to take context and situation into account. That’s a big ask for a complex system that requires many specialist experts to function. We can’t all be experts in everything, but there is a growing appreciation that we need people who have an understanding of how systems function as a whole, and the effects that one part of that system might have on another. That kind of joined-up thinking will help keep the wheels turning and make the journey into the future a more pleasant ride for all of us.