Redesign a Warning

Take one existing dashboard alert apart and rebuild it across icon, colour, sound and text, with a rationale that survives an argument

Due: 16 April 2027 · Weight: 30%

The brief#

Pick one dashboard alert that a real vehicle currently signals badly, and redesign it — properly, across every channel it uses — so a driver under time pressure understands it faster and more correctly.

“Badly” needs a definition, and defining it is part of the work: an alert can fail by being ambiguous (the check-engine light), by matching the wrong channel to the wrong urgency (a chime for something that isn’t urgent), or by assuming knowledge most drivers don’t have (an icon nobody outside the service department has ever correctly identified). Pick a real, specific failure. “Dashboards are confusing” is not a brief; “the 2015–2019 [model]‘s brake-pad-wear icon is visually identical to its parking-brake icon” is.

Redesigning one channel is the easy version of this brief. The alert you choose almost certainly speaks through more than one channel already — a light plus a chime, an icon plus a message — and a redesign that only touches the icon while leaving an inconsistent chime in place hasn’t actually fixed anything. Treat the alert as a small system.

What you submit#

• a one-page statement of the original alert and what specifically is wrong with it, referencing how it currently appears (screenshot, photo, or an owner’s-manual excerpt)
• the redesigned alert, specified across every channel it uses: what the icon looks like (sketch, description, or mockup), what colour it takes and when that colour changes, what sound it makes (described precisely enough that someone could implement it — pitch, rhythm, repetition), and any text wording
• a written rationale (600–900 words) that argues for the redesign using material from weeks 1–8 by name — cite the week and the concept, not just the vibe of the argument