ERIK STAYTON
Intelligences
Calibrating Agency: Human-Autonomy Teaming and the Future of Work amid Highly Automated Systems
LEE CESAFSKY
Alliance Innovation Lab – Silicon Valley
ERIK STAYTON
Alliance Innovation Lab – Silicon Valley, MIT
MELISSA CEFKIN
Alliance Innovation Lab – Silicon Valley
This paper explores how the design of everyday interactions with artificial intelligence in work systems relates to broader issues of interest to social scientists and ethicists: namely human well-being and social inequality. The paper uses experience designing human interactions with highly automated systems as a lens for looking at the social implications of work design, and argues that what human and automation each do is less important than how human and automation are structured to interact. The Human-Autonomy Teaming (HAT) paradigm, explored in the paper, has been a promising alternative way to think about human interactions with automation in our laboratory's research and development work. We argue that the notion of teaming is particularly useful in that it encourages designers to consider human well-being as central to the operational success...
Intelligences
Designed for Care: Systems of Care and Accountability in the Work of Mobility
ERIK STAYTON
Nissan Research Center – Silicon Valley; Massachusetts Institute of Technology
MELISSA CEFKIN
Nissan Research Center – Silicon Valley
In this paper we explore the idea of a system of care through a city transit system. We argue that a systematic orientation to care is central to what makes a transit system work for people. Further, we suggest that this care orientation is recognized as such, even though it is not apparent in typical modes of systems management. Care is what knowing in this system is for. We examine how participants in the system navigate different epistemic bases of their work, focusing on how care work and information work intertwine. How is this work practiced and known? And how could we, as design researchers, use these practices to design systems of care? In service of these goals, we expand the notion of care work toward care of non-human actors as well as that of people. We focus particularly on the roles of automation and the risks automation presents for care. In a moment of increased...
Intelligences
Autonomous Individuals in Autonomous Vehicles: The Multiple Autonomies of Self-Driving Cars
ERIK STAYTON
Nissan Research Center – Silicon Valley & Massachusetts Institute of Technology
MELISSA CEFKIN
Nissan Research Center – Silicon Valley
JINGYI ZHANG
Nissan Research Center – Silicon Valley
We take the polysemy at the heart of autonomy as our focus, and explore how changing notions of autonomy are experienced and expressed by users of self-driving cars. Drawing from work-practice studies and sociomaterial approaches to understanding technologies, we discuss how driving as a task is destabilized and reconfigured by the introduction of increasingly automated systems for vehicle control. We report on the findings of a hybrid ethnographic experiment performed at Nissan Research Center – Silicon Valley, in which we video recorded interactions of 14 participants inside a simulated autonomous vehicle, and conducted semi-structured post-interviews. We look at the responses of our participants in light of three different themes of autonomy, which emerged through the analysis of the...
Perspectives
Speculating about Autonomous Futures: Is This Ethnographic?
by MELISSA CEFKIN & ERIK STAYTON, Nissan Research Center
As researchers working on automated vehicles, we are grappling with fundamental questions about how to do research and design for the future. Or, to be more precise, how can we tap into and participate in futures that are in the process of being made, that may both reproduce and rearrange experiences of today?
One of the questions we must ask is, what is autonomy to begin with? In the era of the rise of increasingly self-acting machines, what exactly will these machines be autonomous from? How are people grappling with shifting perceptions and experiences of autonomy? Our research has explored how people confront ideas about what the future may hold and, more profoundly, how reconfigurations of socio-technical systems today confront them in their own notions of autonomy.
Our paper about one of our research projects on this topic was accepted for EPIC2017, but not without some interesting debate. Anonymous peer reviewers raised a question about whether the work we...