154 <strong>Adjunct</strong> <strong>Proceedings</strong> of the 4th International Conference on <strong>Automotive</strong> <strong>User</strong> <strong>Interfaces</strong> <strong>and</strong> Interactive Vehicular Applications (<strong>Automotive</strong>UI '<strong>12</strong>), October 17–19, 20<strong>12</strong>, Portsmouth, NH, USA (This Page Intentionally Left Blank)
Design challenges for the ‘Social Car’ ABSTRACT In this paper, we briefly describe our position <strong>and</strong> our recent activities in the domain of Social Car, giving our vision about what we consider interesting design challenges in the intersection between Social services <strong>and</strong> the automotive domain. KEYWORDS <strong>Automotive</strong>, Design, Social services. <strong>Adjunct</strong> <strong>Proceedings</strong> of the 4th International Conference on <strong>Automotive</strong> <strong>User</strong> <strong>Interfaces</strong> <strong>and</strong> Interactive Vehicular Applications (<strong>Automotive</strong>UI '<strong>12</strong>), October 17–19, 20<strong>12</strong>, Portsmouth, NH, USA 1. INTRODUCTION Social design is a recently emerged discipline within the broader user experience design, to study <strong>and</strong> define guidelines for shaping the experience of a product or a service in a more participated fashion. The study of design elements in huge online social services like Facebook <strong>and</strong> MySpace has led to a set of guidelines that designers can follow to conceive <strong>and</strong> design social experiences. Typically, design teams of the main actors into the social service domain do not release information about their design choices <strong>and</strong> processes [1]. 2. BASIC ELEMENTS FOR SOCIAL SERVICES Nevertheless, recently Facebook has released some hints <strong>and</strong> suggestions about the three main components for such services: the user community, the conversations between users, <strong>and</strong> the identities of the users themselves [2]. <strong>User</strong>s' community is central in the process of reputation building <strong>and</strong> is the entry point for the so called social context: lists of actions, statuses, information, <strong>and</strong> any other activities that through other friends show the status of the whole community <strong>and</strong> add relevance to individuals. Conversations (i.e. both the listening <strong>and</strong> communicating phases) represent all the interactions happening within the community. The identity is that particular element that is unique to each member of the platform <strong>and</strong> distinguish it from all the others. Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage <strong>and</strong> that copies bear this notice <strong>and</strong> the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission <strong>and</strong>/or a fee. Copyright held by author(s) <strong>Automotive</strong>UI'<strong>12</strong>, October 17-19, Portsmouth, NH, USA. <strong>Adjunct</strong> <strong>Proceedings</strong> Chiesa Mario Istituto Superiore Mario Boella via P.C. Boggio 61 10138 Torino +39-011-2276-403 chiesa@ismb.it 3. EXISTING ATTEMPTS The 'Social Car' is currently in the focus of all the main car makers, that recently have proposed <strong>and</strong> showed in shows <strong>and</strong> fairs their own concepts <strong>and</strong> platform to implement <strong>and</strong> connect to the main social frameworks. The majority of them, together with in-car entertainment appliances makers, embedded <strong>and</strong> mobile devices stakeholders, are converging towards the migration of their own existing solutions into integrated platforms, following diverse approaches, but whit a common goal: cover the largest possible spectrum of opportunities <strong>and</strong> increase the overall users' value of their cars. Several constrains are specific to the car environments, <strong>and</strong> therefore designers have to deal with more limits <strong>and</strong> restrictions, due to distractions' <strong>and</strong> privacy issues, that can have influence into the user interface devoted to interact with specific features for the ‘Social Car’ functionalities [3],[4],[5]. As an example, during latest CES 20<strong>12</strong> in Las Vegas, several car makers like Mercedes Benz with its 2013 SL-Class model [7], have shown in-car platform able to connect <strong>and</strong> interact (with only a subset of functions, focused on the localization of friends) with Facebook. It was not possible to insert text messages, but just to select with touch screen interfaces (the same already used for in-car navigation systems) pre-sets messages, to avoid possible distractions. BMW is proposing its own offer, called ConnectDrive, available on the Series 6, that with the BMW Live service allows drivers to benefit from a selection of services through the BMW Online platform [8]. IPhone owners can connect with Web radio stations <strong>and</strong> use Facebook <strong>and</strong> Twitter through the in-car interface. TomTom since 2008 has been working with IQ Routes [10] <strong>and</strong> its crowdsourcing information gathering system. Rather than a social service, it is a system to collect information about traffic, accidents, <strong>and</strong> special events using a typical grassroots’ mechanism <strong>and</strong> introduce participation <strong>and</strong> sharing ingredients, which are at the root of any social service. Obviously, the quality of implementation of such social service within the car will be one of the buying 'drivers' that will influence people in the choice of their own new car. 4. DESIGN CHALLENGES Rather than simply put Facebook in the car (or Foursquare, Twitter, etc.) or enhance a navigation system (like Waze [9]), mostly of the design challenges are related with the ability to 155