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The design of self-driving vehicles requires an understanding of the social interactions between drivers in resolving vague encounters, such as at un-signalized intersections. In this paper, we make the case for social situation awareness as a model for understanding everyday driving interaction. Using a dual-participant VR driving simulator, we collected data from driving encounter scenarios to understand how (N=170) participant drivers behave with respect to one another. Using a social situation awareness questionnaire we developed, we assessed the participants’ social awareness of other driver’s direction of approach to the intersection, and also logged signaling, speed and speed change, and heading of the vehi- cle. Drawing upon the statistically significant relationships in the variables in the study data, we propose a Social Situation Awareness model based on the approach, speed, change of speed, heading and explicit signaling from drivers. 

Accounting for technologies’ unintended consequences—whether they are misinformation on social media or issues of sustainability and social justice—increasingly requires HCI to consider technology design at a societal-level scale. At this scale, public and corporate policies play a critical role in shaping technologies and user behaviors. However, the research and practices around tech and policy design have largely been held separate. How can technology design and policies better inform and coordinate with each other in generating safe new technologies? What new solutions might emerge when HCI practitioners design technology and its policies simultaneously to account for its societal impacts? This workshop addresses these questions. It will 1) identify disciplines and areas of expertise needed for a tighter, more proactive technology-and-policy-design integration, 2) launch a community of researchers, educators, and designers interested in this integration, 3) identify and publish an HCI research and education agenda towards designing technologies and technology policies simultaneously. 

Rerun is a software system to support post-facto analysis in sim- ulation research. In this submission, we show it working inside a multiplayer driving simulator. Rerun is built in Unity 3D and captures the virtual behavior of participants and their interactions with virtual objects. These recorded behaviors can then be played back from any perspective in the virtual space. This is useful in multi-agent interaction studies because researchers can sift through scenarios carefully from each participant’s perspective or even from an outside observer’s perspective. This enables a fine-grained un- derstanding of implicit and explicit signaling between participants and other human or AI-controlled agents.