About the project
Objective
This project argues that urban autonomous systems should be understood as publicly sustained rather than self-sufficient. It aims to conceptualise the invisible public work through which this dependency is maintained and to explore how design can make it more legible and socially sustainable.
Background
Urban digitalisation is bringing autonomous technologies into urban public space, from service robots on sidewalks to autonomous mobility services and intelligent urban infrastructure. These systems are often framed and deployed as self-sufficient forms of machine autonomy. Yet in practice, their everyday operation frequently depends on co-present people who interpret their behaviour, adapt their own actions, and at times intervene to resolve issues. This is exemplified by pedestrians altering their paths to grant robots passage and removing obstacles or providing instructions when robots become immobilised, and by drivers adjusting their behaviour to ensure safe interaction with autonomous vehicles. This suggests that what appears as machine autonomy is often sustained through invisible public work.
However, this dependency remains under-recognised in both design and deployment. As a result, the work required from the public is often left to emerge informally, without being made legible or supported through design. This can place unfair burdens on people and create friction in shared spaces, undermining public trust and acceptance of these technologies. To address this gap, the project aims to propose and develop the concept of publicly sustained autonomy through empirical and design research. This concept reframes urban autonomous systems as sociotechnical arrangements whose operation depends not only on technical autonomy, but also on distributed support from the public. Building on this framing, the project investigates how urban autonomous systems can be designed to make the public work that sustains them more legible and socially sustainable, and under what institutional conditions such approaches can be deployed responsibly in public space.
About the Digital Futures Postdoc Fellow
Xinyan Yu is a Design and Human–Computer Interaction researcher. She received her PhD from the Design Lab at the University of Sydney. Her research examines how emerging autonomous technologies become part of everyd
ay public life, with a particular focus on human interactions with service robots and autonomous vehicles in urban environments. Situated at the intersection of design research, human-computer interaction, and human robot interaction, her work investigates how these systems are encountered and experienced in everyday settings, and how design can support their integration in more socially meaningful ways.
Main supervisor
Andrii Matviienko, KTH Royal Institute of Technology.
Co-supervisor
Airi Lampinen, Stockholm University
