The car company Fiat is releasing a new model that comes with a built-in eco-driving information system. The principle is very similar to our CHI 2007 project, Celerometer: help drivers improve efficiency by changing their driving style. Here is a description from Fiat’s website of how the system works:
EcoDrive collects all necessary data relating to vehicle efficiency and, through Blue&Me’s USB gate, transmits it into a normal USB key. The driver plugs this into a PC. The “EcoDrive†system presents the driver with detailed environmental performance of the car including the CO2 emission level for each trip. It analyses the driver’s style and then provides tips and recommendations on how to modify style to achieve CO2 reductions – and save money on fuel.
EcoDrive will encourage the driver to set himself challenges – CO2 reduction targets for specific journeys or over a set period of time. And in a community site will encourage all drivers to come together and pool their savings – working towards much bigger collective targets and showing that a lot of small contributions join to have a massive impact.
Like our CHI project, EcoDrive allows the user to set challenges and compare their progress with others. This social influence could be a powerful feature. A key difference of our project is that it offers real-time feedback displayed on the windshield during the act of driving. EcoDrive appears to be completely asynchronous, with feedback displayed on the home computer. However, given that Microsoft recently applied to patent a windshield head-up display, I wouldn’t be surprised if we do see a real-time eco-driving HUD hit the market in the near future.
The annual Bioneers conference, from San Rafael, CA, is “a gathering of scientific and social innovators who have demonstrated visionary and practical models for restoring the Earth and communities”. The event features powerful speakers representing diverse approaches to sustainability.
Lucky for Bloomington residents, this weekend’s conference plenaries are being broadcast live via satellite to IU (click here for details). I stopped in today and checked out a provocative talk by Jay Hartmann, CEO of PAX scientific. PAX is an industrial design firm that uses patterns found in nature to improve industrial products. As Hartmann explained, millions of years of evolution have resulted in forms and systems that are unparalleled by human technology in their elegance and efficiency. PAX studies these ‘optimized geometries’ and applies them to design cleaner, more efficient and benign industrial products. For example the natural spirals have been used to create better fans with a variety of applications.
This overall approach to industrial design is known as Biomimicry and has been written about by Janine Benyus (see more here). Of course the strategy of using natural models as a means to design sustainably is not new. Permaculture design is based on this approach applied to food production, landscaping, and land-use. In the context of architecture, Christopher Alexander advocated for structure preserving transformations in his book Nature of Order. And most recently, Alexander’s work has inspired Eli Blevis to include the principle of “using natural models and reflection” in his manifesto for Sustainable Interaction design.
Hartmann’s talk suggests that this approach is gaining traction in the industrial world, which can only have positive implications for sustainability.
At described in a previous post, Gillan Smith’s writing set up the challenge to develop an “independent language of interaction” that fully exploits the medium of computers — similar to how the early techniques of cinema eventually stabilized into a coherent visual language. While its contentious that such a singular language can be created for HCI, I think most would agree that because cinema is a more mature medium, studying its critical vocabulary can be insightful.
With this in mind, I think Christian Metz’ article gives an insightful phenomenological account for why the medium of film is so powerful. Central to his explanation is the notion of realism. Basically he argues that by captuing motion, film achieves a level of realism that makes its images present to us. Whereas the static images of photography convey a sense of reality in the past, the moving images of film convey a reality that is ‘here and now’. The result is that the viewer is able to ‘participate’ in the represented reality — by identifying with characters, reacting viscerally and emotionally to the action, etc.
However this degree of realism hinges upon the distinct separation between the represented space and the audience’s physical space. This boundary of the screen allows the viewer to forget the real world and enter in to the diagesis. He contrasts this with a stage performance in which this boundary does not exist. The audience shares physical space with the represented reality and thus, says Metz, the vehicle of representation is too real. The result is that the viewer is all too conscious of the artificiality of the performance and ends up identifying more with the actors themselves than with their characters.
I think Metz’ analysis holds a lot of insight for HCI. Not only has he revealed realism as a powerful aspect of the film experience, he has also illustrated how it is affected by particular qualities of the medium, namely motion and separation of space. I don’t mean that we should simply try to mimic the realism of film–in fact I can see one problem with attempting to do that–but rather we can think about the degree of realism which is most appropriate in particular design contexts, and give consideration to how motion and separation of space affect the experience. As a starting point for this kind of analysis, I’ve placed some different interactive experiences where I think they might fit into Metz’ model:
Original post and comments can be found here.