# Interface Design for Responsible Remote Driving: A Study on Technological Mediation
## 1 Introduction  
Remote driving (RD), i.e., the control of road vehicles at a distance, is an emerging transportation technology often associated with potential ethical benefits, particularly when deployed to tackle urban traffic issues. However, prospected benefits could only be reaped if RD can be executed in a safe and responsible way.  
In line with these considerations, the present article aims at investigating how to design RD systems--and, in particular, Human-Machine Interfaces (HMIs)--that put Remote Operators (ROs) in the best conditions to drive responsibly. More specifically, it elaborates and adopts a novel methodological framework inspired by the philosophical literature on technological mediation to discuss current and emerging visual, auditory, and haptic interfaces with the intention of clarifying their impacts on responsible RD and setting the stage for future empirical research and experimental studies.  
By combining insights from engineering, interaction studies, and philosophy, this research offers a multidisciplinary perspective on RD systems that puts responsibility at its very core and reflects on how its exercise is influenced by technology design. The analysis intends to contribute to shedding light on the limitations that remote control technologies might impose on the exercise of responsible driving while also highlighting the opportunities to support it and, thus, to create the conditions for safer urban traffic.  
While it builds on the literature on RD and HMI, this research exhibits three main elements of novelty. First, it introduces the notion of responsible RD and, in so doing, it brings into focus a relevant but arguably under researched ethical issue. Secondly, it explores a new multidisciplinary approach to enrich the understanding of the relation between RD, HMI, and Remote Operators' (ROs) responsibility. Finally, it sketches and applies a novel systematic methodology to evaluate the effectiveness of HMI setups and inspire future empirical research on the subject.  
The paper is structured as follows. Section 2 briefly introduces RD systems from a technical point of view, reviews its prospected benefits, and justifies the choice of focusing on urban contexts of use. Section 3 zooms in on the importance of responsibility as a key enabler of possible ethical benefits. Building on the methodological framework of technological mediation, it claims that interfaces play a pivotal role in co-shaping the exercise of responsibility in RD, i.e., in structuring ROs' perception of driving situations, decision-making processes, and vehicle control. Therefore, interface design is identified as the major issue to be addressed. Section 4 adopts the mentioned methodology to discuss current and emerging HMIs and shows their respective potential in supporting responsible RD. More specifically, three macro-categories of HMIs are examined according to the kind of information they mediate: visual information (Section 4.1), auditory information (Section 4.2), and information concerning physical forces (Section 4.3). Section 5 concludes the analysis by stressing the importance for responsible RD of multi-sensory interface design and future empirical research.