Cooper Journal: The Drawing Board: Fill 'er up

The Drawing Board: Fill 'er up

by The Editors on August 31, 2009 | Comments (2)

We find that looking at the world from the perspective of users and their goals makes us notice a lot of bad interactions in our daily lives. Being solution-minded designers, we can’t help but pick up a whiteboard marker to scribble out a better idea. We put together "The Drawing Board", a series of narrated sideshows, to showcase some of this thinking.

In this episode, we look at car information systems. Sure there’s a ton of useful data in there, but most of it is trapped behind a series of menus, idly waiting for us to enter the correct sequence of commands to unlock it. We imagine a car information system that’s more forthcoming with the data it already has, making us feel like we’ve got a great road-trip buddy in the passenger seat instead of a computer.

Credits: Emma van Niekerk and Suzy Thompson.

2 Comments

Niels Bom

August 31, 2009

So true! A car could also warn you if other fluids are low, or when you've been driving for a lot of hours and it's a good idea to take a rest.

I'd love an integrated system telling you the opening hours of the restaurants you drive by, or telling you to hurry to get to a certain one.

Bryan Yurasits

September 1, 2009

Cars could also show you a mileage count down to your next required maintenance (oil, tire rotation, etc) so you don't have to get an oil change while on a road trip.

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