Use Cases & Applications
Under this title, I wanted to stray away from what most people would say such as the elderly and the people with poor mobility and think of some more specific or different ideas. I thought about the idea of using it a delivery service either for food or perhaps medicine delivery, people who have a fear of driving due to previously being in a car accident or anxious about the idea of driving in general or people using autonomous vehicles as a short time equivalent to driving because they have broken a bone and unable to drive while it heals.
Challenges & Concerns
As a whole class we agreed some of the largest concerns on the use of autonomous vehicles is the security aspect such as feeling safe while a driverless car drives you about with no way for you to intervene with its decisions or the prospect that someone may remotely hack it and cause chaos. I also thought about the concern that the use of autonomous vehicles would cause loss for those who work in the delivery or taxi service industry and the negative impact that would have during a cost of living crisis.
Types of Autonomous Vehicles
We had many ideas for different types of autonomous vehicles from the standard taxi or car to airplanes, trains and trams.
Control of Autonomous Vehicles
As for controlling an autonomous vehicle there is several different ways we could design it to work such as through a touchscreen, through motion and the car picking up your gestures or through voice and audio.
Safety Features
When it comes to autonomous vehicles, I think safety is quite a big thing with a lot of us saying interior CCTV, emergency stop buttons and the ability to automatically lock the doors being a big thing to feel safe and secure while using it. Others suggested the worry around AI and machine learning and how much can we really trust it to drive a car with little to no errors
Benefits of Autonomous Vehicles
Some of the biggest benefits of introducing autonomous vehicles to society is the opportunities it brings with it such as the freedom to travel whenever and wherever also at a quicker pace due to less start and stop time which lowers the road congestion. Other benefits could be the reduced costs, being able to travel alone comfortably and securely especially in big cities and eliminating human error or human caused accidents on the road.
Future of Autonomous Vehicles
We discussed about how the future would look with these vehicles implemented and the impact such as causing the extinction of human driven cars, the potential removal of the steering wheel and front facing seats or perhaps windows and creating a whole new travel environment or the ecological effect due to the rise of electrical autonomous vehicles and how that will impact the environment.
Autonomous Vehicle Technology
The technologies used which I found through my research was the use of radars and sensors to detect other traffic, pedestrians and objects however we though about the use of exterior cameras so passengers can watch their journey or video detection at traffic lights.
<aside> 💭 As a whole this was a really enjoyable exercise which allowed me to share some ideas I had as well as hear others thought an ideas and be able to collaborate and think about the directions autonomous vehicle development could go in the future. It has also really helped me think about the different target users I could use for my project, the kind of technology my vehicle could use and the benefits of the user.
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Storyboarding
A storyboard uses a sequence of illustrations and sometimes text to tell a story or narrative. It breaks the story down into individual chronological ordered scenes showing how the story unfolds.
We started to look at storyboarding today so I decided to do a little research into the history behind why we use storyboards and the impact it has on the decisions we make in design. A storyboard consists of both text and images in a sequence which tells the user a story, it is known be used for films or animations to plan out how the story will flow. It is no surprise that Webb Smith who was credited for creating storyboarding worked at Walt Disney Studios as an animator, who first developed the idea of storyboarding back in 1930 when they created the short film “Three Little Pigs” using storyboards. Webb smith created this first storyboard by pinning different pieces of paper onto a bulletin board in a particular sequence.
This technique quickly spread among others within Disney and other companies and soon after Walt Disney created their very own storyboarding department which highlighted the importance of storyboarding and how it was a crucial step to help ensure the audience were captured by the stories and characters they were trying to sell.
<aside> 💭 It was very interesting to learn a bit of history behind where storyboarding came from but it is no surprise to me that it came from Walt Disney studios as 100 years on, they are still continuing to produce both live action and animated movies which are captivating and engaging from start to end with storyboards. It makes me wonder whether film as we know it would be so engaging today if the storyboard didn't exist or would they be less structured and harder to understand and follow.
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Why do we use storyboarding?
Just like the imaginers at Walt Disney, we can use storyboards to map out the users experience when using a service or a product by creating a good narrative, thinking about how they will interact with it, predicting scenarios and what how it will be interacted with at each stage. Using storyboards can hep us identify problems we may encounter and identify ways we can improve the user experience and story.
The use of a storyboard helps communicated your ideas faster than written word, it is believed that a human can process a picture 60,000 times faster than text which helps build an understanding the the problems and proposed solutions faster due to its more engaging and memorable nature.
Creating A Storyboard
As I mentioned before, a good storyboard is engaging and creates a visual communication between the designer and the user due its memorable images, the empathy it creates and the engagement it brings due to the users curiosity.
The key elements to a storyboard are character, scene, plot and narrative. By using a character or group of characters who have a problem that needs solving, it creates a large amount of empathy and allows the story to fully focus on a specific user persona and their experience of the problem space. The scene in our project instant would be the to and from journey within the autonomous vehicle, setting the scene sums up what the storyboard is about and why the character is there. The plot helps to explain the event and highlight the problems that may arise during the story such as the autonomous vehicle randomly stops and how this problem gets resolved. While the narrative helps the user understand what the end goal of the story is and what they will learn from this event.
All storyboards must account for clarity of what is happening or how something is to be used, authenticity as the more realistic the better the understanding and the outcome of what the storyboard is trying to explain and teach, simplicity because people will understand broken down simplistic content easier than detailed and creating emotion throughout the experience so the user resonates.
Storyboard Activity
In groups we had to come up with a storyboard based on a journey in an autonomous vehicle. My group chose to focus on using an autonomous vehicle as a form of taxi for school children and we storyboarded how a child, their parents and teachers would use the autonomous vehicle and its service to get children safely to school.
<aside> 💭 Reflection
This activity really allowed me to not only get a deeper understanding in why we use storyboards as well as how to create my own and apply the process to my autonomous vehicle project. I really enjoyed working within a group and hearing other peoples ideas as it allowed me to talk about my own ideas.
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Sightmaps
A sitemap allows us to show the various page or elements of our product and how they are related and connect to each other. I created this sitemap in class based off a autonomous vehicle touchscreen for a nervous driver.
<aside> 💭 Reflection
Todays class was very informative and it allowed me to widen my imagination on ideas for my AV project as well as the features a car might need both for the internal tablet but also external factors such as the car itself or an app to hail the vehicle. I also enjoyed learning more about how we can make the experience a story and be able to storyboard the users experience using our vehicle and the narrative we will use.
I also really enjoyed the introduction to sitemaps as I had not heard of them before so being able to implement this into my process will really help make it clearer to me and people who look at the process of my project, what I am designing and the features I hope to include.
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