Welcome to our first blog post of the semester!
We are a client-sponsored project, sponsored by Icon Incar, a mobility experience design company.
As one of our first tasks, we have come up with our team name: IGT Lab. IGT stands for Immersive Grand Touring, which captures the immersive nature of the digital experience we aim to design, and the long, but exciting road trips as represented by “Grand Touring”. As this is an experimental and exploratory design project, Lab struck us as an appropriate suffix to our team name.
We met with our project advisor, Charles Johnson, who gave us a brief overview of the project, our client, and his custom report from CES 2024 which he attended.
This gave us a good idea on where to start looking for resources, case studies, and precedents to gain a better understanding of what kind of future mobility experiences are being discussed and designed.
Some of the more striking experiences were Mercedes Benz’s MBUX Sound Drive, where the vehicle takes in various driver inputs (steering angle, accelerator/brake input) to dynamically change the music being played through the audio system.
BMW’s i Vision Dee was another example of emerging experience design opportunities in the automotive sector. The car comes equipped with a HUD that stretches the entire front windscreen, and also the side windows that can display a digital avatar that would greet the driver.
Our client meeting is scheduled for Tuesday of Week 2, so in the mean time, we are preparing content and questions we wanted to ask for our first client-kickoff meeting.
While we aren’t sure what exactly was expected of us, we want to enter our first meeting with something to share, so that we may make the meeting more effective and efficient.
Some of our initial ideation process resulted with the following idea:
The experience is very much focused on the driving aspect of the mobility experience, and while fun, also has an educational element that encourages smooth driving on open roads.
In addition to our clients, we are also connected with subject matter experts (SME) who will give us feedback and advise throughout the semester.
We are extremely excited for this unique opportunity to work with experts in the field we at the ETC have not yet fully explored.