The one thing more dangerous than not indicating while driving is indicating and then not turning in the indicated direction. The purpose of indicator lights is to signal your intentions as a driver to other drivers and pedestrians so they can make decisions about how to navigate through traffic without waiting for the road to be deserted. Failure to stick with your indicated decisions can cause collisions and even death because you’re feeding other people false information.
Imagine a future where we have computer-operated vehicles such as the GM EN-V, a small electric 2-seater vehicle that can be run in autonomous mode. You select the destination and the vehicle can drive itself there just like in Minority Report.
Perhaps such a vehicle might have a semi-autonomous mode where you give it directions per intersection or turn? What rules should the computer operate on?
On the one hand you can have an entirely responsive computer that will do whatever you instruct immediately regardless of other factors. If you tell it to turn left, then 3 metres from the turn you change your mind and tell it to pull back into the traffic then such a responsive computer would do so. However what you as a driver consider responsive is actually dumb. A computer without sensors, without multiple information vectors and decision-making logic in such complex situations is incredibly basic and dangerous.
To address such issues as I first described with indicator signals a semi-autonomous computer should operate on rules that state if you’ve indicated to turn in a certain direction and pass a particular point of no return based on velocity, road conditions, objects around the vehicle etc then the vehicle should continue with the original instruction and execute the turn, ignoring any attempts by you to abort the turn and return to the main traffic.
Such a computer would be regarded by you the driver as unresponsive. It only does what you tell it some of the time and the rest of the time it has a mind of its own. You will regard the computer as dumb, yet in reality it’s actually smarter than the previous example because it’s working off a larger range of information and inputs to make a fully-informed decision with the intention of providing a good experience for everyone, not just the occupant of the vehicle.
You see, a vehicle that can be trusted to turn left or right when it indicates means other drivers and pedestrians can then make safer decisions about how they’ll negotiate traffic. If the technology can be trusted to stop at pedestrian crossings, red lights and for emergency vehicles then other drivers and pedestrians can be less wary and thus operate more efficiently.
Of course this does introduce the problem of complacency, but that’s not something I want to look at here.
A vehicle with such sensors and programming is essentially designed to offer a good experience for everyone in proximity of the vehicle, not just the occupant. In fact, you could even say that the priority is for designing a good experience for everyone except the user!
In this example, safety is a big decision factor but are there other technologies where designing experience for indirect consumers is critical?
// purecaffeine.com: user experience design, social experience design, social media, Gov 2.0, design thinking and service design blog by designer Nathanael Boehm, Canberra, Australia. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Australia License.
