Design Thinking for Real-World Impact: From Autonomous Vehicle UX to Co-Creating a Social Robot with Syrian Refugees
Rawan Srour Zreik
This seminar examines how design thinking and UX methodologies can tackle complex, real-world challenges across domains such as autonomous mobility and social integration. Drawing on my research with older and younger drivers in the UK and Israel, I demonstrate how participatory design and user-centred inquiry can uncover age-, culture-, and context-specific needs for Take-Over Request (TOR) interfaces in Level-3 autonomous vehicles. These studies yielded inclusive design taxonomies, empirically grounded interface concepts.
In parallel, I present a participatory project with Syrian refugees living in Scotland, where Arabic-language focus groups revealed deep barriers related to trust, information access, and navigating local services. Through co-design, participants helped shape the requirements for a multilingual social-support robot aimed at improving autonomy, emotional comfort, and access to essential resources for newly arrived families.
Together, these projects illustrate how human-centred, iterative methodologies can translate diverse human needs into actionable technological solutions. The seminar concludes by discussing how these same design and UX principles can be integrated into learning and teaching practices, enabling students and practitioners to boost learning outcomes and collaborative class dynamics.
Rawan Srour-Zreik is is a Human–Computer Interaction (HCI) and User Experience (UX) doctoral researcher specializing in human–autonomous vehicle interaction, heterogeneous ageing, and inclusive design. She is in the final stages of her PhD at the University of Glasgow as part of the prestigious UKRI-funded Social AI Centre for Doctoral Training, where she led multi-country studies on takeover performance in Level-3 autonomous cars and developed design frameworks for supporting older drivers. Her work combines experimental methods, participatory design, and cross-cultural research, including a notable co-design project with Syrian refugees in Scotland to create multilingual, trust-building robotic support tools. Rawan brings an interdisciplinary background spanning computing science, psychology, and design thinking, with a strong commitment to applying user-centred methodologies to real-world mobility and social integration challenges.
