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Background

Nissan came to Speck Design with the goal of better understanding the integration and use of personal technology in vehicles and how it relates to the overall driver and passenger experience.  Nissan requested a research team to investigate both current and future user behavior in relation to technologies within the automotive market, such as cell phones, music devices, dashboards, and sound systems.

Challenge

The project included the following specifications:

• Conducting competitive analysis of the competition.
• Determining current unmet needs.
• Addressing future user needs by looking at potential trends up to 10 years into the future.

The findings were presented through careful analysis of the market and design trends in relation to the automotive industry, specifically into which trends Nissan would fit.

Solution

With over 20 years of research experience across a spectrum of industries and methodologies, our in-house research department compiled information through thorough ethnographic methods over the course of one month.  The research team compiled and analyzed information depicting the direction in which automotive companies were headed in relation to user-technology.  We made specific note of technologies that were left unaddressed in the current driving experience, such as texting and various forms of social media.  We also analyzed personal technologies available today and how they would trend in the future in relation to the driver and the passenger.

Results

Speck Design turned these findings into formal concepts for Nissan.  The concepts generated from the research were presented in story board form demonstrating competitive analysis, current unmet needs, and future trends. 

The concept car, Actic, was a sleek, silver, bullet-shape vehicle with a matching trailer.  The concepts embodied potential trends of ways in which vehicle owners might utilize technology in the future in the automotive industry.  One of our ideas for the Actic was the notion of an advanced concept dashboard.  Traditional vehicle control systems tend to have an overwhelming amount of information on the dashboard.  Our component, the “digital key fob,” was a small palm-size control system that allowed users to choose the dashboard interface with infinite flexibility and updateability.  This meant the dashboard could be customized and managed depending on the user’s interests or desires. 

Another huge contribution from the research team was the digital moon roof.  Speck Design was able to create full color, moving imagery on the roof of the car, all while allowing light to pass through.  To achieve this, the Speck Design team deconstructed six flat screen displays and re-built them into the roof of the car in a tiled fashion so that they would create the illusion of one larger, singular image.  Drivers could change the look of the interior by changing the images, from swimming fish, to blowing leaves, to swaying palm trees.  Overall, the research provided a vision, direction, and promising leads to Nissan in their designs for the future, whether it is the individual components or the vehicle as a whole.

PROJECT INFO

• Client:

  Nissan

• Project:

  Actic Concept Car

• Industry: