# Systemic Design Strategies for Shaping the Future of Automated Shuttle Buses
## 1 Introduction  
With the advent of emerging vehicular technologies such as automated driving, connected cars, and electric vehicles, as well as the concept of Mobility as a Service (MaaS) [1], public transport systems are undergoing a profound transformation. A new type of mobility based on autonomous, connected, electric, and shared vehicles [2] is coming into being. As such, expectations are rising for those vehicular technologies to be applied in public transportation, putting Shared Autonomous Vehicles (SAV) in the spotlight. SAV is an umbrella term for shared public buses and logistics vehicles, also known as robot taxis or shuttle buses. Some vehicle companies have already explored these new markets, putting their automated shuttles into commercial use. Based on their primary functions, these automated shuttles can be roughly divided into delivering goods and transporting human passengers [3, 4]. Examples include the robotic delivery vehicles from Nuro and Udely in the United States; the autonomous shuttle \"Olli\" from the (recently shut down) American Local Motors Company; the autonomous shuttle Arma from the French company Navya; and the driverless taxi \"Apolong\" by the Chinese company Baidu [5]. Such a transformation of the public transport system suggests adopting a macro and systemic perspective. The city transport system has long been considered a sociotechnical system [6, 7, 8]. The term was initially coined by [PERSON] and [PERSON] (1960) to describe systems that involve a complex interaction between humans, machines, and the environment [9]. Any significant technical development implies \"the formation of novel sociotechnical systems\" [10]. The transition to the SAV is undoubtedly disruptive for current transport sociotechnical systems, which rely on manual-driving private cars. Furthermore, the \"technization of society and the socialization of technology\" is emphasized for a sociotechnical system [10], and changes induced in a sociotechnical system imply \"many complex interactions between societal groups, different actors as well as the alignment of specific factors\" [11]. However, the current focus of AV research in the design discipline is mainly on technology developments, usability testing, interaction modes in user experience, etc. These separate investigations ignore the system's macro environment and fail to address the complex linkages between the different influencing factors in this system. Self-driving vehicles would disrupt the mode of transportation in future cities, opening a challenging design space that should be addressed systematically, considering the impacts on the entire sociotechnical system. The current design research on autonomous vehicles is guided mainly by service design through subjective data collection methods (such as observation and interviews) [12], as well as on prototype outputs and iterations of HMIs in interaction design [13], which implies a lack of a systemic design perspective. As an interdisciplinary design field underpinning systems thinking and design thinking [14], systemic design is considered to effectively inform human-centered design for complex sociotechnical systems [15] and catalyze social systems changes [16]. As such, adopting a systemic design to speculate the sociotechnical system innovations triggered by the future diffusion of automated shuttle buses is promising. In this research, we report a workshop with senior undergraduate students from China who utilized systemic design to propose a future vision of automated shuttle buses. We took the systemic design strategies presented by [PERSON] and [PERSON] (2020) [17] as the theoretical framework to organize the process and methods of the workshop. After the workshop, we conducted a series of semi-structured interviews with five participating students to collect their feedback on the usability of the systemic design approach. Given the significance of systemic design and sociotechnical system theory for this research, we will first introduce those two fields.