Automotive User Interfaces and Interactive Vehicular Applications

and more of a locked computer system to its everyday
driver/user. What Chalmers and MacColl meant with
seamful designs was that the functionality and the internal
connections between various parts of a system would be
understandable to users in how they were connected and in
some sense why. Very much similar to what Ishii and
Ullmer wanted with their tangible bits, to make the internal
structure of some system more understandable to its users
so that they if not could help their system connect by
moving the GPS system closer to the window or similarly,
but at least understand why the system at some point in
time was not working as it should.
All this again becomes highly relevant when we now as
interaction systems designers enter the world of wireless
sensor technologies, in the car, and elsewhere.
FROM BITS TO MATERIALITY
Another issue we have though when now entering this
new world of digital materials, i.e. mobile sensor
technologies, is that the digital, hardware and software,
always has been, but now even more, a very complicated
design material for many designers to work with. As any
other designer, such as textile designers or artists,
interaction systems designers should be able to handle and
play around with their design material, in their case the
digital, while working out a design in order to make use of
all the potentials that comes with this brilliant material of
digital technologies. At the same time though, it is very
rarely that we see someone perfectly skilled in creative
design and hardcore engineering, all embodied into one
person alone. More and more common in HCI are therefore
interdisciplinary design teams, where dancers,
psychologists, behavioral scientists and others work
together with creative designers and engineers developing a
specific design solution together. As HCI experts we can
only guess that the same goes for design teams involved in
car development. As it is not possible to touch or feel
digital materials at any given moment, understanding
properties and potentials of digital materials is a major
challenge for design teams and management. Methods and
tools are needed that enable these interdisciplinary design
teams to work with digital materials as a shared resource
within design innovation. The novel Inspirational Bits
approach [7] is one such method. In this method the
engineers in parallel with the designers conceptual work
develop quick and dirty designs in materials that appear
likely to be used. This they do for two reasons, first to
allow themselves to get an understanding of the design
materials at hand and their interactional material properties
that cannot be felt and thereby not completely
understandable if not set together into a running system.
But also they do this in order to become able to
communicate these properties in a fun, inspiring and
understandable way to the rest of the design team, for
everyone to become able to use the material properties as
inspiration for the design they develop together. This we
find would be a very interesting method to use in the very
technically advanced material context of the car.
CONCLUSION
To conclude, this rough walk through of some of the issues
concerning the development of gesture and movementbased
interaction in HCI we want to state that the car is a
limited physical space and as researchers and designers in
this design space we need to be very sensitive to the issues
of safety and driving. But with that in mind there are great
possibilities here for what more natural user interfaces
involving gestures and speech can do towards reducing
driver distraction in certain cases but also towards services
that allow for new bodily experiences in the car. Of course
we do not see a future where the driver or the passengers
will be dancing in cars, but we do see a future with more
bodily experiences in the car, such as the bodily
experiences of singing out load or the bodily experiences of
backseat gaming [2]. But we also see how the HCI
community in general has perhaps a longer history of
discussing issues of movement-based interaction, bodily
experiences and material possibilities, which is why we
with this position paper hope to draw attention to some of
these issues for the car research field now to build further
upon, and build on from all the great possibilities of the
specifics of the digital materials in the car.
Acknowledgements The financial support by the Federal Ministry of
Economy, Family and Youth and the National Foundation for Research,
Technology and Development is greatly acknowledged (Christian Doppler
Laboratory for Contextual Interfaces).
REFERENCES
1. Benford, S., Schnädelbach. H., et al. (2005). Expected,
Sensed, and Desired: A Framework for Designing
Sensing-Based Interaction. ACM Transactions on
Computer-Human Interaction, Vol. 12/1, p. 3 30.
2. Brunnberg, L. (2002). Backseat gaming: expolaration of
mobile properties for fun. CHI '02 extended abstracts on
Human factors in computing systems. Minneapolis,
Minnesota, USA, ACM: 854-855.
3. Camurri, A., C. Canepa, et al. (2008). Social active
listening and making of expressive music: the
interactive piece the bow is bent and drawn.
DIMEA 08, Athens, Greece, ACM: 376-383.
4. Chalmers, M. and MacColl, I. (2003) Seamful and
seamless design in ubiquitous computing. Workshop At
the Crossroads: The Interaction of HCI and Systems
Issues in UbiComp.
5. Ishii, H. and B. Ullmer (1997). Tangible bits: towards
seamless interfaces between people, bits and atoms.
Proc. of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in
computing systems. Atlanta, Georgia, United States,
ACM: 234-241.
6. Rekimoto, J. (2002). SmartSkin: an infrastructure for
freehand manipulation on interactive surfaces. CHI
2002, Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA.
7. Sundström, P., Taylor, A. S., et al. (2011). Inspirational
Bits - Towards a Shared Understanding of the Digital
Material. CHI'11, May 7-11, Vancouver, BC, Canada.