A design course on how a car talks to the person behind the wheel — through needles, lights, icons, chimes, text and heads-up displays — and what happens to that conversation when it goes wrong.
What you will do
Every week you take apart one channel a car uses to talk to its driver — needles, warning lights, icons, colour, sound, text, heads-up displays, driver-assistance alerts — and ask what it assumes about the person reading it, under how much time pressure, and what happens when the assumption is wrong. You'll audit a real dashboard, redesign a warning that currently fails, and finish the semester by designing a complete alert vocabulary for a vehicle of your own choosing and defending it as a system.
Who it is for
Students with some background in HCI or information design who want to work on a problem with hard physical stakes: a driver has seconds, not minutes, and the dashboard doesn't get a second attempt at being understood. You don't need to know anything about how cars work mechanically — this is not a maintenance course — but you do need to be willing to look closely at something you've probably stopped noticing.