Designing for driver's emotional transitions and rituals

Abstract

Emotions are a topic of increasing interest in vehicle design and research as they have a substantive impact on people's behaviour, affecting driving performance and being a source of safety issues particularly on long journeys. However, emotions do not usually occur distinctly and individually and frequently transition and transform between states. It can be challenging to obtain information about the exact emotions drivers experience, especially when subtle. We present design-led research focusing on identifying scenarios that contain normally unarticulated emotions and mental reminders that drivers use to make a journey safer and develop concepts for in-vehicle interactions that assist with these rituals. As results of the research, we designed and user tested in-vehicle interactions for two emotional transition scenarios - pre-journey preparation ('Ready... Steady ... Relax') and checking the progress of a journey ('Driving Whisper').