Core77 Recognizes “Crossing Paths” Project
June 17, 2026
Autonomous delivery robots are already sharing sidewalks with pedestrians across hundreds of cities worldwide. ID graduate student Shreya Mathur (MDes 2026) built a design framework for how to make that coexistence work—and now Core77 has recognized it.
Mathur’s project, “Crossing Paths: When Human-Centered Frameworks Are No Longer Enough,” has been named a Student Notable in the Speculative Design category of the Core77 Design Awards 2026—one of the most respected recognitions in the design profession. The project was developed with Associate Professor Ruth Schmidt, whose research in behavioral design shaped the project’s systems-level approach.
Designing Trust as a Variable, Not an Outcome
Most design work on autonomous robots focuses on technical capability—how well robots navigate, avoid obstacles, or complete deliveries. Mathur’s project starts from a different question: what happens when the user is no longer human? When autonomous systems and people share the same public space, traditional human-centered frameworks leave a gap. This project fills it.
Drawing on research across seven global cities—from Chicago to Bengaluru—Mathur examined how people develop trust in autonomous delivery robots through everyday encounters. The result is a framework that translates trust from an abstract concept into concrete behavioral design decisions through three experiential constructs:
How effortlessly humans and robots coordinate in shared space. Seventy percent of study participants favored robots that communicated distress explicitly during failure moments, while preferring quiet, non-intrusive behavior during normal operation.
How transparently a robot communicates its purpose, direction, and state. Fifty-six percent of participants identified clear display of robot activity as the most important factor in their comfort and cooperation.
How safe and at ease people feel in a robot’s presence. Sixty-four percent preferred simple, polite motion cues over expressive personality, suggesting calm signaling outperforms constant emotiveness.
The framework’s immediate application is delivery robots, but its principles extend to any domain where autonomous systems share space with people—hospital service robots, warehouse automation, and consumer-facing products like home assistants.
What Makes This Work Distinct
Speculative Design at Core77 recognizes projects designed for cultural commentary, intervention, or exploration of possible futures. The 2026 category included provocative work on aging, neuroscience, aphasia, and ecological futures—most of it asking audiences to imagine and reckon with what might come.
Mathur’s project addresses a future that is already arriving, and offers designers the tools to shape it. Where most speculative design work imagines, “Crossing Paths” intervenes—producing actionable, data-grounded design principles that product teams can apply today. That distinction is visible in the research methodology: literature review, social media analysis, a cross-city questionnaire study with 30 participants aged 25–40, data clustering, and storyboarding, structured using ID’s own behavioral systems frameworks developed by Associate Professor Ruth Schmidt and André Nogueira (PhD 2019).
About the Core77 Design Awards
The Core77 Design Awards celebrate the richness of the design profession and the insight and perseverance of its practitioners. The Speculative Design jury was led by Jacob Turetsky, Principal and Founder of Artiform Design, and included Mesve Vardar, Founder of Radyo Studio, and Yukiko Naoi, Creative Director at Interwoven Design Group.
Shreya Mathur’s work is one example of what ID students pursue: design research that addresses real and pressing challenges with rigor and imagination. Learn more about the Master of Design (MDes) program at the Institute of Design at Illinois Tech.