Martin Tomitsch

The University of Sydney · School of Architecture, Design and Planning

The increasing transition of human-robot interaction (HRI) context from controlled settings to dynamic, real-world public environments calls for enhanced adaptability in robotic systems. This can go beyond algorithmic navigation or traditional HRI strategies in structured settings, requiring the ability to navigate complex public urban systems cont...

Autonomous vehicles (AVs) necessitate a transformation in how pedestrians and vehicles communicate. Existing research largely focuses on unidirectional communication from AVs to pedestrians. However, traffic interactions are inherently reciprocal and social. To lay the foundation for truly bidirectional interactions with AVs, this study maps the di...

With the rise of autonomous vehicles (AVs) in transportation, a pressing concern is their seamless integration into daily life. In multi-pedestrian settings, two challenges emerge: ensuring unambiguous communication to individual pedestrians via external Human–Machine Interfaces (eHMIs), and the influence of one pedestrian over another. We conducte...

The deployment of autonomous delivery robots in urban environments presents unique challenges in navigating complex traffic conditions and interacting with diverse road and sidewalk users. Effective communication between robots and road and sidewalk users is crucial to address these challenges. This study investigates real-world encounter scenarios...

In this study, we propose the use of virtual urban field studies (VUFS) through context-based interface prototypes for evaluating the interaction design of auditory interfaces. Virtual field tests use mixed-reality technologies to combine the fidelity of real-world testing with the affordability and speed of testing in the lab. In this paper, we ap...

In this article, we report on the design and evaluation of an external human-machine interface (eHMI) for a real autonomous vehicle (AV), developed to operate as a shared transport pod in a pedestrianized urban space. We present insights about our human-centered design process, which included testing initial concepts through a tangible toolkit and...

In this paper, we investigate how to elicit new perspectives in research-through-design (RtD) studies through annotated portfolios. Situating the usage in human-robot interaction (HRI), we used two robotic artefacts as a case study: we first created our own annotated portfolio and subsequently ran online workshops during which we asked HRI experts...

In this position paper, we present a collection of four different prototyping approaches which we have developed and applied to prototype and evaluate interfaces for and interactions around autonomous physical systems. Further, we provide a classification of our approaches aiming to support other researchers and designers in choosing appropriate pr...

The advent of cyber-physical systems, such as robots and autonomous vehicles (AVs), brings new opportunities and challenges for the domain of interaction design. Though there is consensus about the value of human-centred development, there is a lack of documented tailored methods and tools for involving multiple stakeholders in design exploration p...

The rise of autonomous systems in cities, such as automated vehicles (AVs), requires new approaches for prototyping and evaluating how people interact with those systems through context-based user interfaces, such as external human-machine interfaces (eHMIs). In this paper, we present a comparative study of three prototype representations (real-wor...

Robots in urban environments will inevitably encounter situations beyond their capabilities (e.g., delivery robots unable to press traffic light buttons), necessitating bystander assistance. These spontaneous collaborations possess challenges distinct from traditional human-robot collaboration, requiring design investigation and tailored interactio...

Biodesign is an inherently interdisciplinary pursuit, where design and scientific knowledge and practices are come together to benefit human and planetary wellbeing. To grow a biodesigner requires nurturing disciplinary knowledge, providing interdisciplinary exposure and creating effective boundary objects. However, research in education has noted...

Policymakers advocate for the use of external Human-Machine Interfaces (eHMIs) to allow autonomous vehicles (AVs) to communicate their intentions or status. Nonetheless, scalability concerns in complex traffic scenarios arise, such as potentially increasing pedestrian cognitive load or conveying contradictory signals. Building upon precursory works...

Pedestrian interfaces support people’s interaction with autonomous agents in traffic scenarios. Early studies relied on computer-generated (CG) environments to evaluate pedestrian interfaces in virtual reality (VR). More recently, real-world 360-degree videos have been used as an alternative to CG environments as they support immersive and realisti...

The increasing transition of human-robot interaction (HRI) context from controlled settings to dynamic, real-world public environments calls for enhanced adaptability in robotic systems. This can go beyond algorithmic navigation or traditional HRI strategies in structured settings, requiring the ability to navigate complex public urban systems cont...

Autonomous vehicles (AVs) may use external interfaces, such as LED light bands, to communicate with pedestrians safely and intuitively. While previous research has demonstrated the effectiveness of these interfaces in simple traffic scenarios involving one pedestrian and one vehicle, their performance in more complex scenarios with multiple road us...

The ability of autonomous vehicles (AVs) to interact socially with pedestrians poses a significant impact on their integration with urban traffic. This is particularly important for vehicle-pedestrian shared spaces due to increased social requirements in comparison to vehicular roads. Current pedestrian experience in shared spaces suffers from nega...

In this study, we propose the use of virtual urban field studies (VUFS) through context-based interface prototypes for evaluating the interaction design of auditory interfaces. Virtual field tests use mixed-reality technologies to combine the fidelity of real-world testing with the affordability and speed of testing in the lab. In this paper, we ap...

Road safety, and in particular pedestrian safety, represents a growing global concern as urban populations continue to rise and age. Motorists and passengers have benefited from technological improvements for their safety, but pedestrian safety remains largely dependent on simple traffic lights, physical interventions in the built environment, and...

This study examines motivations, definitions, methods and challenges of evaluating the social impacts of smart city technologies and services. It outlines concepts of social impact assessment and discusses how social impact has been included in smart city evaluation frameworks. Thematic analysis is used to investigate how social impact is addressed...

As mobile robots enter shared urban spaces, operating in close proximity to people, this raises new challenges in terms of how these robots communicate with passers-by. Following an iterative process involving expert focus groups (n=8), we designed an augmented reality concept that visualises the robot’s navigation intent and the pedestrian’s predi...

Augmented reality (AR) has the potential to fundamentally change how people engage with increasingly interactive urban environments. However, many challenges exist in designing and evaluating these new urban AR experiences, such as technical constraints and safety concerns associated with outdoor AR. We contribute to this domain by assessing the us...

Whether we work for a startup, agency, or large organisation, we constantly make decisions about what and how we design and who we involve. Driven by short-term goals, it is easy to miss how our decisions cause ripples that can negatively affect ecosystems and future generations. Drawing on global trends, academic research, and decades of experie...

Shared space reduces segregation between vehicles and pedestrians and encourages them to share roads without imposed traffic rules. The behaviour of road users (RUs) is then controlled by social norms, and interactions are more versatile than on traditional roads. Autonomous vehicles (AVs) will need to adapt to these norms to become socially accept...

After almost a decade of relentless development, pervasive urban displays have fragmented into a diversity of approaches with radically distinct characteristics in terms of how mobile they are, as well as the materials they are made of. In this article, we investigate such a diversity in terms of the relationships between key conceptual entities of...

In this article, we report on the design and evaluation of an external human-machine interface (eHMI) for a real autonomous vehicle (AV), developed to operate as a shared transport pod in a pedestrianized urban space. We present insights about our human-centered design process, which included testing initial concepts through a tangible toolkit and...

Over the past decades, the field of interaction design has shaped how people interact with digital technology, both through research and practice. Interaction designers adopted human-centred design to ensure that the interactive products they design meet the needs and desires of end consumers. However, there is surmounting evidence that placing the...

Wearable augmented reality (AR) offers new ways for supporting the interaction between autonomous vehicles (AVs) and pedestrians due to its ability to integrate timely and contextually relevant data into the user's field of view. This article presents novel wearable AR concepts that assist crossing pedestrians in multi-vehicle scenarios where sever...

In recent years, researchers and manufacturers have started to investigate ways to enable autonomous vehicles (AVs) to interact with nearby pedestrians in compensation for the absence of human drivers. The majority of these efforts focuses on external human–machine interfaces (eHMIs), using different modalities, such as light patterns or on-road pr...

For the past decades humans have been placed at the centre of designing information and communication technologies (ICT), leading to the rise in prominence of human-centred design. The field of smart cities has equally adopted notions of citizen participation as a way to ensure that technological solutions improve people’s livelihoods. However, the...

This chapter discusses the application of digital technologies for creating interactive media facades. It introduces different approaches for creating dynamic building skins that can respond to external stimuli from within the building’s environment. These approaches are demonstrated through media façade projects spanning from technologies that all...

The emergence of autonomous vehicles is attracting intense scrutiny for the transformative effects it may have on urban infrastructures and planning systems. Much of this scrutiny, though, has arguably focused on driverless passenger cars designed to operate on conventional carriageways. In this paper, we argue the car-centric vision of autonomous...

An increasing number of studies employ virtual reality (VR) to evaluate interactions between autonomous vehicles (AVs) and pedestrians. VR simulators are valued for their cost-effectiveness, flexibility in developing various traffic scenarios, safe conduct of user studies, and acceptable ecological validity. Reviewing the literature between 2010 an...

For the past decades humans have been placed at the centre of designing information and communication technologies (ICT), leading to the rise in prominence of human-centred design. The field of smart cities has equally adopted notions of citizen participation as a way to ensure that technological solutions improve people’s livelihoods. However, the...

In this paper, we investigate how to elicit new perspectives in research-through-design (RtD) studies through annotated portfolios. Situating the usage in human-robot interaction (HRI), we used two robotic artefacts as a case study: we first created our own annotated portfolio and subsequently ran online workshops during which we asked HRI experts...

The augmentation of the built and urban environment with digital media has evolved and matured over recent years. Cities are seeing a rapid rise of various technologies; a trend also accelerated by global crises. Consequently, new urban interfaces are emerging that integrate next-generation technologies, such as sustainable interface materials and...

The nascent field of biodesign creates novel applications of life sciences through design methods. Biodesign has the potential to shift interactive computational systems from using purely digital components to systems that integrate living organisms. However, there is a lack of understanding of biodesign and how it advances HCI. We present a review...

The rise of autonomous systems in cities, such as automated vehicles (AVs), requires new approaches for prototyping and evaluating how people interact with those systems through context-based user interfaces, such as external human-machine interfaces (eHMIs). In this paper, we present a comparative study of three prototype representations (real-wor...

Public digital technologies are increasingly pervading cities around the world, creating a new phenomenon of “urban spamming,” which exposes urban dwellers to vast amounts of commercial advertising and other forms of digital content. Over the years a large body of work has focused on how these technologies can be harnessed to engage urban dwellers...

Technological progress paves the way to ever-increasing opportunities for automating city services. This spans from already existing concepts, such as automated shuttles at airports, to more speculative applications, such as fully autonomous delivery robots. As these services are being automated, it is critical that this process is underpinned by a...

This design methodology book provides over 80 different methods of design and is the perfect resource for design educators, students, and practitioners. Think of this resource as a sort of ‘refer to’ handbook when you’re stuck or need some inspiration for your latest design project or lesson. It considers the world outside of design where products...

This article reports on a study of an online system for supporting professional learning within higher education. The system was developed through an iterative user-centred design process to ensure that it supported the needs of academics. Results indicated there were a number of practice-related factors that emerged from within the user’s environm...

The advent of cyber-physical systems, such as robots and autonomous vehicles (AVs), brings new opportunities and challenges for the domain of interaction design. Though there is consensus about the value of human-centred development, there is a lack of documented tailored methods and tools for involving multiple stakeholders in design exploration p...

Urban interfaces play an important role in the field of media architecture and smart cities. They enable citizens to access the digital layer of the city, to interact with urban applications, and to make more informed decisions about how they utilize the urban infrastructure. As the field of media architecture is diversifying, urban interfaces can...

Purpose The capability to create and manage innovations is recognized as an important skill not only for entrepreneurial activities but also for the survival of organizations. The last few decades have seen a noticeable growth in innovation education programs across the world. Innovation education is on the cusp of moving from being an optional sub...

HCI researchers have begun to more systematically study non-digital transient approaches for displaying information in public space, for example, in the form of chalk infographics. These approaches provide several benefits compared to digital displays, such as: ad-hoc deployment, barrier-free interaction, and being more sustainable. However, one li...

Public interactive displays (PID) are a promising technology for providing information and collecting feedback in public spaces. Research on PIDs has shown that, like all public displays, their efficacy is reduced by display blindness. Rather than increase the visual attention-grabbing nature of PIDs, we propose that additional understanding is req...

Community engagement has been widely discussed in both academic and practitioner literature, in particular around the types of tools, techniques, and methods used to undertake engagement. The practice of community engagement is at risk of becoming fragmented if there is a disconnection between the engagement objectives, the mechanisms used for peop...

Pervasive displays and other public interfaces in urban environments offer great opportunities for improving access to information and services, allowing people to make better informed decisions, and generally contributing to the smart city agenda. However, what is often overlooked are the impacts of such interventions on the environment and on und...

Recent studies have investigated new approaches for communicating an autonomous vehicle's (AV) intent and awareness to pedestrians. This paper adds to this body of work by presenting the design and evaluation of in-situ projections on the road. Our design combines common traffic light patterns with aesthetic visual elements. We describe the iterati...

Brainstorming is an important part of creative design, related to exploring the associativity of different ideas and the combination of their parts. Previous work has investigated social interactions, productivity, techniques, and quality of brainstorming activities. The paper contributes to this body of work by studying the design affordances of b...

In this paper, we investigate current approaches to the design of pervasive urban displays through two dimensions: increasing levels of physical integration of content into the surrounding environment (attached, blended, physicalized), and increasing levels of mobility of the display technology (fixed, portable, self-moving). We provide a classific...

This paper presents a conceptual application of drone-based in-situ projections to support people when crossing busy roads that lack dedicated pedestrian crossings. To overcome technical, legal and risk challenges of evaluating these kinds of speculative pervasive display applications, we introduce the concept of hyperreal prototypes. We describe t...

Applying the concept of perpetual beta to cities proposes a continual and never complete process of city-making. Building on this notion, this chapter employs a conceptual framework of urban acupuncture for conducting and analysing localised small-scale community engagement activities through situated pop-up interventions. Pop-up interventions ‘hac...

This chapter presents a discussion about the design and development of bespoke “city hacking” initiatives focused on community engagement. We draw from the literature in the field to propose a definition of plug-in interfaces as portable interactive technology deployed directly to public spaces on a temporary basis and addressing pre-existing archi...

Previous work has highlighted the need for human factors research to not only focus on the passengers inside driverless cars but also consider others who will interact with the car in an urban environment such as pedestrians. In this paper, we position this area of research as a new opportunity for HCI and propose a framework to guide the design of...

This paper presents insights from a research study, which involved the use of a Rapid Modular Prototype (RMP) to augment user interviews. RMPs are a combination of interchangeable modules made from tangible materials and physical computing components, such as Arduinos and Raspberry Pi. In our research study, we created a prototype to inform the des...

Celebrating the centenary of Leslie Wilkinson’s appointment as Australia’s first Chair in Architecture, SYDNEY SCHOOL explores the moments that gave shape to what is now the Sydney School of Architecture, Design and Planning. As architectural design, town and country planning, architectural science, design computing and architectural theory found t...

Research on media architecture to date has predominately focused on the integration of digital technologies, such as low-resolution media façades, into urban environments within a public context. In this paper, we present an analysis of two case studies, which investigated the use of low-resolution display technologies within a residential context...