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NU Medill · 2024

Self-Driving in San Francisco

Built an interactive digital piece about the increase of autonomous vehicles in San Francisco to bring the self-driving experience from the streets to the screen.

InterviewingDigital JournalismPrototyping
Impact / Results

Interviewed 12 riders and SMEs, built a web interactive with a 3-part AR "ride", published and presented story

Team

4 students (Journalism, Computer Science, Industrial Engineering)

Skills / Tools

Interviewing, feature writing, web design, usability testing, HTML/CSS, JavaScript, Figma, Photoshop, Adobe Premiere

Understanding the rise of robotaxis

For three months of 2024, we investigated the rise of autonomous vehicles (robotaxis) in San Francisco and what a robotaxi actually feels like. The goal: translate that first-person ride into an interactive piece that explains the emerging technology behind self-driving cars, surfaces trust and confusion surrounding the commercial robotaxi landscape, and captures what autonomous transportation could mean for the future of mobility in cities.

From rides to reporting

After background research and taking multiple rides in Waymos ourselves, I ran 12 interviews across perspectives: a local writer and frequent Waymo/Cruise rider, a Zoox software engineer building the "toaster" taxi, and a Teamsters union representative focused on regulation and worker impact. These conversations mapped both excitement and risk, and shaped the narrative arcs of public safety, transportation policy, and human-technology interaction.

Bringing the ride to the screen

To translate our reporting into a cohesive story, we sketched visual flows in Notability, then wireframed our designs in Figma and built the story from scratch using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. The piece sequences readers through an immersive introduction to self-driving cars, covers development/controversies, and ends with a forward looking section contemplating the future of autonomous transportation. 

Presentation at Northwestern University

Publishing the experience

The result is an interactive feature that makes a robotaxi ride legible on the web and packages multiple viewpoints without losing nuance. On the way, we solved practical hurdles—securing on-record sources, fixing video render issues, and tuning CTAs through peer tests. Though we were not permitted to publish our story to external media outlets (agreements made between Northwestern and our sources), we presented the published piece to our design cohort and Northwestern faculty in March 2024.

What did I learn?

  1. Report first, then think about the technology/experience.
  2. If possible, experience the story yourself. It informs perspectives more than any kind of desk research.
  3. Trust is earned, not guaranteed. Sources don't owe you anything.
  4. Seek diverse input along the way to drive reporting and editing, not just at the end of the process.