HIVE - Autonomous Vehicles for daily mindfulness
How autonomous driving will change the perception of mobility?
Time
Client
Project type
Role
Jan 2022
Academic project
Automotive UX Design
UX and Visual Designer
Tools
Figma, Protopie, Arduino, Python-based eye-tracking
Problem outline
Autonomous driving technologies will bring uncertainty in the way we approach the daily usage of vehicles and how we actually may see them in the future. Ownership models and the typology of industry players in the automotive field are probably going to change. Hence we have no clue what cars will look like and what they will represent for users in their daily lives in the next decades.
Solution
Hive is an autonomous car-pooling service able to offer custom trips that exploit users' biometric responses to comply with their moods.
Hive configures a specific set of ambient lights, aroma perfumers, sound frequencies, and matched users to satisfy users’ needs in terms of mood to perceive during the trip. Hive is able to learn from users' responses and improve time by time the accuracy of the settings proposed.
Process
Map
This first step saw the team engaged in an effort to understand the context where this project was set. After desk research methods (that only provided us with summaries of technologies and the potential evolution of the automotive industry), the potential users of future mobility have been approached directly. That allowed us to have a clear view of how mobility is going to turn in the future and how users would perceive it.
From the mapping activity, an important key driver for the project was inferred. No matter what kind of vehicle and what kind of past driving experience they may have, users tend to establish a bond with their usual means of transport. This bond affects feelings and emotions generated through the experiences users collect with them during their lives.
Sketch
After clearing out what the design challenge was about, we moved to fix clear users and scenarios of use to drive the consequent concept ideation phase. Using the "How might we... " question format, we went through the listing of different User journeys of mobility and daily commuting users to understand the main pain points and opportunities.
In particular, we focused on developing a design scenario around the topic of emotional bonds inferred in the mapping activity.
How might we transfer the emotional bond
into autonomous pooled vehicles?
Time-by-time customizability of the vehicle interiors following users' moods (and through what perceptions single moods are perceived) was the key aspect that helped us to bring the emotional bond human-vehicle into a mobility space that is not owned by users. In our minds, pooled autonomous vehicles have the opportunity to turn themselves into safe spaces in which users can experience self-reconnection and indulge their moods.
Define
After a fair amount of discussion and conceptual iteration around the ideas presented, we developed HIVE, an autonomous car-pooling service able to offer interior settings and match with other customers following single users' moods.
The system is divided into three components: the vehicle cockpit that hosts users and sets up an environment (working through lights, fragrances, and acoustic tones) able to indulge users' chosen mood and to detect their biometric responses to the offered setting, a mobile app that hosts all the digital component of the mobility experience (from user profiling to trip booking and management of ambient settings,...) and a cloud infrastructure that supports the whole architecture, managing users' data and vehicle fleet.
Prototype
Given the technical complexity of the project context, the prototyping activity concerned the creation of an experiential MVP arranged with several Arduino boards and sensors (ECG and EDA) custom-coded eye-tracking software, and a preset of ambient lights, music, and aroma diffusers for the vehicle set, together with a Protopie demo of the mobile application.
Test
During the test activity, we decided to focus the goal of the whole assessment on the soundness of the concept itself, rather than the usability aspects of the technologies adopted. The MVP developed hosted several trials of trip activities for the moods proposed by Hive. During those trials, in which testers were asked to perform a different set of activities, we monitored their attentional span and overall engagement during the sessions.
Conclusion
The efforts shared by all the members of the team have been unprecedented in our careers. We were asked to provide an elaborated concept and scenario of use despite the far distance in the time of its scenario of use. Adopting an approach like the one promoted in the Design Sprint has been useful in this sense to widen our views on the topic of future mobility.
Looking at the missed opportunities in this project, for sure an extended time and focus on the research, especially around users and market trends could have brought a few more interesting variables to the table. In addition, an additional inclusion of the vehicle interface in the design process (which has not been taken into account due to time constraints and the nature of the brief) would have brought additional value and possibilities to the concept.
A further envisioning of this solution could exploit daily monitoring of biometrics of users already done by wearable devices and automatically predict which kind of settings will fit best every user before they even realize what they are going to need. This would represent in my opinion an interesting design space as we could test mobility influence with daily life and vice versa.