Where Did The Car Go? : Smart cities, calm technology and the future of autonomous cars

Urbanization has been a growing trend in the past fifty years. Cities are now transforming into smart cities, spaces whose infrastructure comprises an embedded digital layer. Hardware collects real-time data in the urban environment and software elaborates it to improve all types of services, from traffic to waste management to well-being. One technology that is expected to use this digital layer to further change the urban environment is the autonomous car. The purpose of this dissertation is to explore what key design attributes future autonomous cars should possess if they have not only to co-exist with and be accepted by people in the landscape of tomorrow’s smart cities, but also what they should not possess in order not to cause any harm. In this sense, the dissertation recognizes calm technology to be necessary in the design of a future autonomous car to support a human-centered, as opposed to a car- or technology-centered, environment. A socio-technical and systemic lens is applied to the phenomenological investigation of nine companies carried out by means of twelve in-depth semi-structured interviews with experts working within the automotive sector, the smart city industry, and calm technology. Eight attributes (safety, on-demand, geo-tracking, sharing, multiple purposes, communication through smart devices, electrical care and IoT/connectedness) are identified as necessary for future autonomous cars to implement in order to take advantage of the smart city infrastructure and provide a human-centered experience. Additionally, six out of the eight calm technology principles recognized in literature are considered necessary when designing future autonomous cars