What is covered, week by week, and which topics each lecture draws on.
Every lecture the course claims to run gets a dated page and a teaching-team
reference. A course decides how many lectures it needs; one of them carries a
real deck. related: connects lectures to the sessions and assessments they
feed.
The dashboard as language
Why a dashboard is a designed language rather than a neutral report of facts, framed through the Jaguar E-Type and the Mercedes MBUX Hyperscreen
Week 1 · 22 February 2027
Needles and Gauges — The Analogue Century
Why continuous analogue gauges dominated dashboard design for a century, and what they assumed about the driver reading them
Week 2 · 1 March 2027
The idiot light
What a dashboard loses, and gains, when a continuous measurement becomes a single light — from the 1950s–60s US gauge-to-light shift to the modern check-engine light
Week 3 · 8 March 2027
Icons and symbols — building a shared vocabulary
How a tiny pictogram comes to mean the same thing across languages, literacy levels and decades, through the case of the tyre-pressure warning icon
Week 4 · 15 March 2027
Red, amber, green: the grammar of urgency
How three colours came to carry the entire weight of automotive urgency, and what happens to a driver for whom two of them look the same
Week 5 · 22 March 2027
Chimes, dings and voices — the sonic register
What makes a warning sound urgent without becoming alarming, examined through the seatbelt chime's regulatory escalation against Tesla's deliberately sparse chime set
Week 6 · 29 March 2027
From acronym to sentence: text on the dashboard
What a full sentence can tell a driver that an icon and a two-letter code never could, and the translation bill that arrives the moment the dashboard starts writing in words
Week 7 · 5 April 2027
Heads-up: the dashboard on the windscreen
What changes when an instrument stops living in the dashboard and starts living in the driver's own view of the road
Week 8 · 12 April 2027
The vocabulary of almost-autonomy
What an alert is actually claiming once the car can act on its own judgement, and why Volvo's City Safety (2008) is the moment the dashboard started narrating decisions instead of reporting symptoms
Week 9 · 19 April 2027
Cry wolf: trust and alarm fatigue
What happens to a warning system's credibility the tenth time it's wrong, and why the driver-assistance features most likely to matter are also the ones most likely to get switched off
Week 10 · 26 April 2027
The same car, different countries
Why the same vehicle platform ships with a different urgency vocabulary depending on which market it's sold into, and what that says about whose "urgent" a dashboard is actually built around
Week 11 · 3 May 2027
The next dashboard
If you were inventing this vocabulary today, with no legacy dashboard to imitate, what would you keep, and what would you throw out — and what happens once the vocabulary lives in software the manufacturer can change after the sale
Week 12 · 10 May 2027