In organizations, the interest in automation is long-standing. However, adopting automated processes remains challenging, even in environments that appear highly standardized and technically suitable for it. Through a case study in Amsterdam Airport Schiphol, this paper investigates automation as a broader sociotechnical system influenced by a complex network of actors and contextual factors. We study practitioners' collective understandings of automation and subsequent efforts taken to implement it. Using imaginaries as a lens, we report findings from a qualitative interview study with 16 practitioners involved in airside automation projects. Our findings illustrate the organizational dynamics and complexities surrounding automation adoption, as reflected in the captured problem formulations, conceptions of the technology, envisioned human roles in autonomous operations, and perspectives on automation fit in the airside ecosystem. Ultimately, we advocate for contextual automation design, which carefully considers human roles, accounts for existing organizational politics, and avoids techno-solutionist approaches.

Sustained adoption of automation is a problem for organizations, despite the promised benefits of automation and the propensity for organizations to expect it to transform their workplaces. To address this problem, previous work in HCI has mostly considered the perspectives and experiences of users interacting with automation technologies and has not considered the broader organizational context consisting of different stakeholders with varying needs and expectations around automation. Taking Amsterdam Airport Schiphol as a case study, we examine the challenges faced by practitioners responsible for integrating automation projects in its airside ecosystem, in an interview study conducted with 8 participants. Our findings reveal three challenges to the adoption of automation within the organization - the lack of consensus among different stakeholders, the need to adapt the technology to the specific context, and the undefined procedures required to maintain automation after implementation, that should be further addressed by the HCI community.

Autonomous products (e.g., home cleaning robots, smart fridges, or autonomous vehicles) take over tasks that require time and effort from their users, redefining both the user roles and context around a product. Consequently, meaningful user experiences should be designed to overcome the risk of relegating humans to undesirable tasks and to take the opportunity of employing users’ newly available time, in contexts such as highly automated vehicles. Meaningful experiences are provided when fundamental user needs (i.e., universal needs that directly contribute to our wellbeing) are fulfilled. Nevertheless, designers face challenges in anticipating and fulfilling user needs related to autonomous products, since autonomous technology continues evolving towards products that are not yet in existence. In this paper, we employ a co-creation workshop method to explore how the typology of thirteen fundamental needs can serve as a starting point to design meaningful user experiences associated with autonomous vehicles. Specifically, our goal is to understand how the typology of thirteen fundamental needs (e.g., autonomy, beauty, comfort...) could help in (1) identifying how deep user needs manifest themselves in a given context and (2) conceptualizing meaningful experiences with autonomous devices. In this aim, we elaborate on the challenge of designing meaningful non-driving- related experiences in fully autonomous vehicles, which could emerge in the future if driving tasks become obsolete. The results propose new clusters of activities and a scenario for each fundamental need, and ultimately show that engaging with the fundamental needs could be a valuable foundation for designing rich human interactions with future technologies.

This poster presents the “Accelerating Innovation” programme, a set up for
three PhD research projects that was created within the collaboration between the
Royal Schiphol Group and the Industrial Design Engineering faculty of the TU Delft.
With this collaboration, researchers from the IDE faculty were engaged in three challenges: (1) designing towards pandemic antifragility in Multimodal Transport Hubs (MTHs); (2) transforming Airport Hubs into passenger-oriented MTHs, and (3) investigating the adoption of autonomous processes in the context of organizations. An action research methodology is followed in the projects, meaning that the researchers are embedded in the organization, and actively participate in daily
practice. This poster presents the scope of the three projects, as well as the studies and academic supervision tasks that the researchers have undertaken until now; we hope to contribute with an example of action-research oriented PhD projects, which could serve to ilustrate transdisciplinary research perspectives.

Resilience is a concept that describes the capability to be restored after unprecedented events, originally emerged from biology and human sciences. This paper aims to explore what a resilient public transportation system is and how nature’s wisdom can be used as an inspiration for the creation of resilience in the area of mobility, by linking public transportation systems, biomimicry and resilience together. To this end, qualitative co-creative workshops were conducted with eleven domain experts from public transportation, biomimicry, and biology. The experts addressed several factors contributing to resilience in public transport that could be categorized into four aggregated dimensions: resilience through system organization, resilience through information management, resilience through operating performance, and resilience through subsystem integration. Finally, a conceptual wheel framework on factors of resilient public transportation systems is proposed, aiming to shed light on future public transport developments, where a systemic perspective is to be adopted.