Posted at Jun 30/2005 08:22PM:
chris witmore: excellent! thanks for taking notes Rebecca!

---

Notes June 30, 2005

Rules for brainstorming

Let loose, anything goes, criticism taboo. Openings, not closing things down.

People in cars:

• small child in baby seat (4)- family young ids with dog
• 20 year old group snowboarding weekend activity
• grandparents (72 and 74) 3 state radius to visit grandchildren
• urban commuter (32) city-city, suburb-city, city-suburb
• sales rep/wedding planner
• car renter/car sharer/carpooler/taxi passenger (intermittent user)
• long distance truck driver

metaphors for thinking about interior

• car as home
• car as entertainment palace
• car as office
• car as runabout (car as car, just a way to get places)
• car as extension of self/identity marker
  • sensorium-
    • factor of variety
    • ability to change.
    • configurability
  • Performance
    • roles (emergent) deriving from the space you’re in and your engagement with it (seat by seat or vehicle by vehicle)
• car as art
• car as train (when sharing/carpooling)
• car as auxiliary room/storage/listening room
• car as escape pod/personal space
• car as phone booth
• car as intimacy/social space
• car as sports equipment

activities

• conversation
• listening
• watching
• looking
• eating
• keeping stuff
• reading
• fighting
• interacting
• creating intimacy
• driving
• gathering information
• telling/making stories
• playing games
  • are these games (license plate, alphabet in order, I spy, etc) a way to AVOID disengaging from the driving experience, and allowing you to remain involved and aware (and thus safe)?
• shipping stuff

mobile media

• my idea- store information in another location, and log in anywhere that’s connected (and theoretically, everything will be connected- home, office, hotels, cars, etc)
  • this would be horrific from a content licensing viewpoint- would you license just for you to use, or for a certain number of locations, or what?
  • this would extend wonderfully for travel, you could even personalize your content in planes, letting the airlines off a bit
• push vs pull models of content management- (push is radio, things that you might like, pull is using stuff you own.
  • how do you get new media?-
  • how do you know what the new music is?
  • do you want to be able to remove songs/artists from your rotation, customize your ‘radio’? perhaps have an individual push model, that plays stuff you own as well as occasionally stuff it thinks you would like.
  • to what extent might you be willing to pay per view instead of purchasing outright?

List of types of content- car info (dash)

• personal interaction (voice and text)
• music
• route management and destination information (GPS- voice, text, graphics)
• video
• text
• voice

for all of these, there are issues of convergence, modularity, and device implications. How much do you want to separate these things and how much do you want to allow them to interaction.

• can one thing interrupt another? This should probably be avoided.
• Screen within screen?
• separate screen for different activities?
• where can the signals be sent? GPS to the back, video to the passenger, etc.

Getting back to our people.

• 20 year old group, snowboarding-weekend activity
  • repeated travel, do it every weekend
  • lots of conversation, know each other well
  • eating in car, stop and get food
  • will they spend a lot of time on the phone with other friends?
  • will they be taking and sending pictures?
  • the journey itself becomes something they are all sharing, through ephemeral use of media.
  • listening to music
  • checking with other friends, arranging places to stay, etc.
  • anticipation (of the fun ahead) and memory (of pervious trips)- high quality images so cameras (and video cameras) instead of phones, documentation of the trip and of the activity- these aren’t watched much except for IN the car, because while you’re there you’re DOING it not watching it.
  • HP ‘ubiquitous media’- blurring the distinction between the event and the media.
  • Intel lab at Berkeley, ‘familiar strangers project’ document people in a space over a span of time, who goes repeatedly, how they change their movements different times, etc. ephemeral nature of travel combined with oddly permanent nature of repetition.
  • this is interesting temporally, because these things don’t often get looked at later (or independently of the repeated event), but as part of the event they are VERY interesting during travel, as you plan or remember the event itself.
  • are these likely to be shared outside the group (either in the moment or later)?

other

• insulation/ reaching out. Connecting inside-outside
• interesting to do an expert interview with caltrans

Return to Meetings