THE FUTURE OF DRIVING EXPERIENCE: AN INTERDISCIPLINARY STUDENT PROJECT
Year: 2016
Editor: Erik Bohemia, Ahmed Kovacevic, Lyndon Buck, Christian Tollestrup, Kaare Eriksen, Nis Ovesen
Author: Krzywinski, Jens; Wӧlfel, Christian; Lorenz, Sebastian
Series: E&PDE
Institution: TU Dresden, Junior Professorship for Industrial Design
Section: Preparing Students for Cross-dsciplinarity
Page(s): 527-532
ISBN: 978-1-904670-62-9
Abstract
What will car-driving be like in the future? Will people be managers programming transportation
devices? Will people be pawn in the hands of a service industry? Will people be committed to inaction
despite all safety apparatus? Will there be a joy of driving? This paper presents an interdisciplinary
students project that aimed at investigating the future of driving experience.
There were 25 participants from the fields of industrial design, interaction design, knowledge
architecture, communication acoustics, traffic psychology and automotive engineering working in
teams. Each team developed an innovative approach on multimodal experiencing of autonomous
urban transport. The participants worked on the same task as teams at two competing European
universities, the task has been instructed by a large German car company.
The projects followed a generic procedure of exploring the topics, identifying and defining problems,
developing approaches and concepts, designing product-related ideas and implementing the ideas in
physical models and multimedia. The results were presented in two themes, immersive dynamics and
holistic interaction. The themes comprised of three design proposals each. The proposals ranged from
drive gloves and haptic steering wheels to active seats and urban exploration devices, addressing
human interaction with the car as well as the environment. The interdisciplinary composition of the
teams and the consequent incorporation of prototyping throughout the process allowed presentations
of the results that could be experienced and interacted with.
Keywords: Interdisciplinary, student project, mobility, multimodal, interaction, prototyping.