Contextual inquiry of future commuting in autonomous cars

Millions of people consider their car-based commuting a daily hassle. Autonomous car technology promises a relief from driving related stress and may change the commuting experience fundamentally. So far, research in this field has mainly been focused on commuting in manually driven cars or on usability and safety issues of specific driver automation technologies. In order to explore how to design activities and entertainment for future commuting in fully autonomous cars, we conducted a contextual inquiry inspired field study with three car-based commuters in an improvised autonomous car. This paper introduces our research setup and presents preliminary findings. It contributes to the exploration of the design space of autonomous driving in two ways: (1) the paper describes a pragmatic approach to adapt a contextual inquiry for the exploration of future use cases of autonomous driving and (2) it also articulates design implications and temporal frames derived from our first set of user studies that we regard as essential for designing context-sensitive entertainment in future cars.