What I’m questioning here is what we want to do with our time and about who (or more likely what) gets our attention. There’s a brilliant blog here from four year ago by the now sadly defunct Berg London, talking about the attention grabbing qualities of devices; how they make you look less at the real world. Matt Jones sums it up:
“The iPhone is a beautiful, seductive but jealous mistress that craves your attention, and enslaves you to its jaw-dropping gorgeousness at the expense of the world around you.”
As car designers, it sometimes feels like we’re saying: “Look, we can offer something even better than your iPhone”, but (even if that’s possible) is this really such a great vision of the future? Or does it simply mean you end up with one of two in-car scenarios: A) you work on your way to and from work as well as at work; or B) cat video.
So instead, shouldn’t autonomous car design better capitalize on the unique qualities the car has — moving through real space we can see and interact with? Instead of the hermetically sealed box form and digital windows, could we not use the opportunities the autonomous car creates to:
- Make bigger and more expansive windows?
- Consider the practical reality of a single-person autonomous car, to fit the reality of 90% of car journeys — not the mythical uber-GT for four smiley adults that the F 015 imagines, which rarely happens in real life.
- Use design ‘devices’ (in the holistic sense of the word) on the inside of the car to connect the people in it, with the world outside — or vice versa?
- Explore the idea of the car’s persona — of it guiding you through interesting, un-seen bits of the city on a journey of discovery.
- And if the autonomous car’s really going to be a space for having video conferences, or taking endless selfies, then why not make the interior really optimized for such scenarios? Why not go the whole hog and design an in-car selfie stick?!
- Flip the notion of connectivity on its head, by creating a car that intentionally blocks external communication in order to truly shut you off and relax you as you move from A to B!
These are superficial, top-of-the-head ideas, but they each hint at the potential for autonomous cars to be a starting point for something new, unique and interesting for car design. And that as designers, it’s our role to create a car environment which inspires, and attracts enough attention, that it can keep occupants’ eyes away from the smartphone in their hands and ultimately that godforsaken cat video. In short, we need to create alternative yet compelling visions rather than letting blind faith in connective technology sleepwalk us into the future.
This article originally appeared on Car Design Research and was republished with permission. Read more of their insights here
