Automotive User Interfaces and Interactive Vehicular Applications

custom sound system as ‘her’ car – not her husband’s not her
children’s but hers. She specifically bought the car for its small
size – all her kids can’t fit in the car at once – so her husband’s
car, by default, remains the family car. And yet, when she
unpacked her car, we found a host of Liverpool football (soccer)
decorations chosen by her eldest son (Norashikin doesn’t like
football); her husband’s fancy commemorative pen, her sister-inlaws
pregnancy log book/medical records, her son’s sunglasses,
an Islamic blessing to protect her bought by her husband and a
slim volume of Islamic texts received as a guest gift at a wedding.
These two simple examples suggest that it’s not only the drivers
who we should consider in designing smart transportation
systems, but also other occupants, and people who interact with
and are concerned about them.
2.2 What Belongs in the Car
During our interviews and excavations, car owners expressed
deep ambivalence around the appropriateness of bringing and
using mobile technologies in their cars, and of investing in built-in
solutions to keep them more in the flow of their digital lives.
There’s a growing list of electronic devices such as cell phones,
smart phones, tablets, portable media players and laptops that
people bring into their cars, and often strata of technology on its
last legs or utterly discarded in glove boxes, under seats and in
door holders and on sun visors . British and U.S. car owners used
their cars as a kind of purgatory for their aging CD collections, a
technology no longer useful anywhere else in their lives as their
music collections are fully digitized. Reggie, a design director in
London quipped that “my car takes me back 10 years”, yet he was
unwilling to do away with his CD player in favor of an IVI system
or even a stereo with USB or memory card slot; it wasn’t worth
investing in a technology that he couldn’t take with him outside
his car. For Savannah, a project manager in Portland, fixing the
quirky built-in GPS system in her Toyota Forerunner wasn’t
worth the effort when she could just as easily find directions using
her iPhone. In fact, she wasn’t even sure here GPS system was
broken; she blamed the faulty directions on her own shortcomings
in understanding the ‘Japanese logic’ of the interface. You can’t
fix what’s not broken.
2.3 Location-Specific Preoccupations
Globally, cars are considered sites of great risk. During
excavations, we learned about location-specific safety concerns
and local solutions to perceived dangers. These local dangers
/solutions were not about the car protecting people, but rather
supplementary forms of protection from potential dangers that
were intimately related to being in or using the car. They are not
dangers that car manufacturers could easily predict and design for
globally but that smart local systems could address.
Drivers take for granted that their cars are constructed to help
them prevent collisions and to minimize the impact. What the car
manufacturers can’t control is the local driving environment and
the behavior of other drivers. To address this danger, almost every
car we’ve excavated had supplemental protection against
accidents in the form of religious or locally defined good luck
charms: crosses, Korans, evil eye medallions, Chinese knots,
Bibles, Buddha, the Virgin Mary, good luck pigs and other
religious and luck pendants, statues and iconography abound on
rearview mirrors and dashboards.
In Brazil, all aftermarket and portable technologies (GPS, smart
phones) were brought in to the car for each drive and carried out
when the car was parked. Car stereos were upgraded, but large
screen, more advanced IVI systems were avoided in favor of
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portability. Furthermore, air conditioning and tinted windows
were explicitly described as necessary safety features, rather than
as a ‘nice to have’ features that add to the comfort of your drive in
a hot climate. In Brazil, having anything built into your car leaves
you a target for thieves, and leaving windows open while driving
leaves you vulnerable to grab-and-dash muggings from ‘Motoboys”
slipping between traffic jammed cars.
In Singapore, people were more concerned with social risks than
personal and property safety. Glove compartments were filled
with ang pau, or good luck envelopes used to gift money at New
Years, weddings, birthdays and other celebrations. The
possibility of showing up to an event without the proper materials
to fulfill your social obligations was a much greater risk than
anything that people worried about happening along the route.
The explanation we heard over and over again was that ang pau
were in cars because you never know when you might be invited
to an “emergency wedding” (or show up with an insufficient gift,
and need to supplement with ang pau). Although no one admitted
this happened to them, the potential for social embarrassment was
so anxiety producing that people were always prepared!
3. NEXT STEPS
What’s interesting to us at Intel and what should be interesting to
automobile designers is not any one of these attributes – the
relationships people have with each other, their stuff or to lived
experiences like safety – but to all of these in combination, in
specific places like Brazil or Malaysia and while on the go. Taken
together, we begin to see forming a rudimentary design space that
goes beyond the car itself and considers the infrastructure and
ecosystem around the car. These excavations exposed both users
and practices that point to the importance of location and context
both inside and beyond the car itself, and inspired our second
research project, Local Experience of Automobility [8].
4. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Susan Faulkner, Ana Patricia Rosario, Tad Hirsh, Laura Rumbel
and Tim Plowman contributed to this research.
5. REFERENCES
[1] Miller, D. Ed. Car Cultures. 2001. Berg Publishers, Oxford
[2] Ross, K. Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonizing and the
reordering of French Culture. 1996. MIT Press
[3] Zhang, Jun. 2011. Driving toward modernity: An
ethnography of automobiles in contemporary China.
Dissertation,
[4] Siegelbaum, L.H. 2011. Cars for Comrades: The Life of the
Soviet Automobile. Cornell University Press.
[5] Conley, J., Tigar, A. 2009. Car troubles: critical studies of
automobility and auto-mobility. Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
[6] Paterson, M. 2007. Automobile politics: ecology and cultural
political economy. Cambridge University Press.
[7] Featherstone, M.,, Thrift, N., Urry, J.(eds) 2005.
Automobilities, Sage Press.
[8] Zafiroglu, A., Plowman, T., Healey, J., Graumann, D. Bell,
G. and Corriveau, P. The Ethnographic (U) Turn. 2011.
Automotive UI 2011, Salzburg, Austria.