AutoPlay: Unfolding motivational affordances of autonomous driving

The AutoPlay prototypes have been designed to explore the implementation of non-driving activities into the context of a future autonomous driving situation. The conceptual design goal was to maintain a pleasurable situational awareness of the inactive driver by integrating the driving context as a meaningful input into the interaction system. In this chapter, we introduce the design of three experimental applications for autonomous driving and report on explorative user studies conducted to investigate the impact of the three AutoPlay prototypes: AutoGym, an in-car exertion game that translates car speed and traffic situations into an individual exercise program. AutoJam, a touch sensitive steering wheel cover to generate interactive music experiences in a creative interplay with car’s driving dynamics. AutoRoute, a discovery application for future urban commuting in autonomous cars that enables an exploration of the city based on spontaneous routing and rerouting. Furthermore, we reflect on the outcome of the user studies and propose three motivational affordances of autonomous driving: drivability, performability, and explorability. Each of these concepts, help to understand the motivational possibilities of the autonomous driving situation and facilitates a meaningful alignment of interaction systems and the driving context. We discuss the underlying concepts of the three affordances by relating them to the experiences identified in the user studies. Subsequently the contribution of this chapter is twofold: (1) We introduce the AutoPlay prototypes as inspirational concepts for aligning non-driving activities with the autonomous driving context and (2) we propose three motivational affordances as design targets for the implementation of non-driving activities in order to initiate a broader discussion on the pleasures of autonomous driving beyond instrumental motives.