In partnership with Monash University’s Emerging Technologies Research Lab and She’s A Crowd, a social enterprise working to end gender-based violence, this drama-documentary invites us to consider: how people and organisations might effectively use automated decision-making (ADM) in the rideshare sector to deliver a safe and trusted service; and where the starting points for design for rideshare ADM systems and technologies should be.

She’s Not Alone is a short film co-produced by ADM+S researchers Jeni Lee and Dr Emma Equilty that highlights some of the safety issues women and gender diverse people experience in and around transport. In a world where automated systems, technology and digital data are increasingly present, the film raises discussion around automated safety features including tracking, surveillance and emergency alerts.

If we are to bring people into the process of ADM technology design then we need to ensure that the conceptual categories that frame theory and practice in innovation account for people.

This project interrogates a suite of anticipatory categories and the arrays of concepts that support them, which are commonly used in innovation narratives, amongst industry and policy stakeholders and in academic disciplines that are complicit with their agenda—such as human-computer interaction research and other computer science and engineering disciplines, and organisation studies.

It identifies the key categories and concepts, analyses how they are mobilised in narratives of innovation, their relationships to solutionist paradigms, how they structure processes of research and how they are actually implied in research and design practice.

Highway to the Sky is a short film co-created with 3 neuro-diverse artists and art therapist Isabelle Ashford from The Art to Wellbeing.

The participants in the workshops used collage, art works and dance to imagine future mobilities and explore what sensations arise from automated travel and what they would like to be automated (or not) in the future.

The creative process elicited reflection and thoughtful responses from the project participants and highlighted their sensory experiences.

Through a series of short film vignettes, this research project explores how diverse participants currently experience transport mobilities and how automated technologies might be part of our future lives.

These films aim to surface impacts of ADM that haven’t been accounted for and explore barriers and biases propagated and amplified by ADM in society.

Future visions of self-driving cars, digital mobility services, flying taxis and autonomous industrial vehicles dominate industry and policy hype; new mobilities technologies, communities and aspirations are rapidly shaping; and automated and connected mobility technologies are increasingly present, and unevenly distributed in everyday life.

Our research addresses how these and other shifts in and imaginaries of mobilities technologies, services, communities and personal trajectories are changing the landscape of everyday mobility, and reframes emerging automated and connected mobility technologies and data as part of inclusive and diverse everyday worlds and respectful, responsible futures.

To achieve this we will develop critical and innovative methods of research and engagement including documentary film and design materials.

Vision is central to the field of autonomous vehicle (AV) research. While much of the research into AVs has focused on the technical aspects of vision, such as object recognition and sensor development, this project turns instead to its social, cultural, and political dimensions.

Our goal is to counter corporate and industry visions of self-driving cars by using creative methods to explore alternate visions.