From Screen to Street: Insights for Autonomous Mobility Design from Movies

Fictional media, such as movies, offer a rich speculative lens for exploring people’s interaction with and the societal implications of future technologies. In this paper, we apply this lens to the domain of autonomous mobility, mapping a speculative landscape to inspire the design of future autonomous mobility systems. We systematically examine 36 autonomous mobility systems depicted across 31 movies and construct a speculative landscape that reveals how these systems are imagined in terms of interaction design, agency, and their embeddedness within broader societal contexts. This analysis offers design researchers a resource for inspiration and critical reflection, highlighting opportunities to reimagine autonomous mobility design while also surfacing pressing concerns raised by dystopian cinematic imaginaries.