This project focuses on critical design artefacts and investigates how their inherent narrativity can be used to promote nuanced discussions about AI system. Specifically, a series of four provocative steering wheels has been developed and used within the context of focus groups aimed at investigating potential stakeholders attitude towards driving automation.

From a Meaningful Human Control perspective, in fact, the process of driving automation and its related implementations should be approached as a complex and distributed decision-making system. In particular, autonomous driving technologies should be seen as a complex challenge not only at the use level, but also, and foremost, at the design level, where assumptions and values get implicitly embedded in the process and, in turn, in novel products. In fact, as we claim that, to be under MHC, an AI agent should remain confined to its moral operational design domain (moral-ODD), we argue for the need for understanding which moral consideration are at play, and which assumptions and values influence these.

This understanding can be built through the collaborative effort of different discipline, among which design. Specifically, design can contribute with its expertise in participatory processes and critical thinking. This project, then, draws on this design expertise to facilitate the investigation of people assumptions, concerns and desires towards autonomous driving. Designed to have a rethoric rather then practical function, the critical design artefacts facilitate discussions among potential stakeholders to go beyond the claims propagated by popular media and dominant storytellings. As such, this use of critical design artefacts aims to promote a more responsible approach to AI systems development.