Friday 13 March 2015

Designing Your Future with the Connected Car

The company Frog Design are currently hosting a session on "Designing Your Future with the Connected Car".

It was good to meet the leads from Frog; Cobbie and Michael.

The introduction circled around the goals of the session; exploring User Centred Design, and the Connected Car.





What is the connected car?



It's predicted by Telefonica that by 2010, 90% of all new car sales will be for connected cars.

What are connected cars;

- Wirelessly connected
- GPS
- Sensors
- HCI / HMI changes
- Wearables
- BIG data
- Machine Learning
- AR

Apple's Car Play, Google's offering and lots of other tech companies are trying to get into the in vehicle space. And lot's of car companies are trying for the self driving car.

User Centred Design

The session then focussed around the human element of cars - that everyone has a car story and interactions with cars are an emotional experience.

What are the needs / issues we are trying to solve with technology?

A process they follow is;

1) User research
2) Synthesis and brain storming
3) Storyboarding the best concept(s)
4) Illustrating the idea with a photo prototype
5) Pitching the idea

Idea in and around the connected car

Makes lives safer
- Proximity sensing
- Object identification and response / avoidance
- V2V comms

Show us the way
- Nav-D project on the road
- Search a map
- AR overlay on road / ghost car

Save Time
- Sync device e.g. nest
- Self parking
- Self driving cars

Make life richer
- In car comms
- Ride sharing
- Spaces / places to connect e.g. CES Mercedes swivel chairs

Help us explore
- Podcasting
- Exploration tools / road trips
- Contextual interfaces

Knowing us
- Personality & name for the car
- Driver (and passenger) emotion monitoring
- Health monitoring / biometrics
- Awareness and AI e..g Google car that looks 'adorable'.

Some of the Tech involved