Defense Against the Dark Cars: Design Principles for Griefing of Autonomous Vehicles

As autonomous vehicles (AVs) become a reality on public roads, researchers and designers are beginning to see unexpected reactions from the public ranging from curiosity to vandalism. These behaviors are concerning, as AV platforms will need to know how to deal with people behaving unexpectedly or aggressively. We call this griefing of AVs, adopting the term from harassment in online gaming. We discuss several examples of griefing observed in on-road field studies using a Wizard-of-Oz driverless car. While Uber and Waymo have anecdotally mentioned vandalism towards AVs, we believe this to be the first public video available of AV griefing ranging from playful to aggressive. To stimulate discussion, we propose speculative design principles to address griefing. CCS CONCEPTS • Human-centered computing → Interaction design theory, concepts and paradigms; Empirical studies in interaction design; Interface design prototyping. ACM Reference Format: Dylan Moore, Rebecca Currano, Michael Shanks, and David Sirkin. 2020. Defense Against the Dark Cars: Design Principles for griefing of Autonomous Vehicles. In Proceedings of the 2020 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI ’20), March 23–26, 2020, Cambridge, United Kingdom. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 9 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3319502.3374796