I started my summer job this past week, and my car broke down en-route to my first day. In the ensuing shuffle of towing, repair, car-swap, and pick-up, I've driven from Berkeley to Santa Cruz, up to the mountains and back to the sea, to San Francisco, back to Santa Cruz, and then all around again. It's been hours alone in a car.
I'm the child of my father (a Detroiter) and product of the American Midwest, which is to say, I enjoy the act of driving and don't really flinch at long hours on the road. May was a really dynamic month, and I've appreciated lots of solo time on beautiful and well-maintained California roads to reflect, collect thoughts, and just look out at the world with the window rolled down. We will see if I still find the drives refreshing by the end of the Summer, but for now, I love my car and I treat it like a little pod for thinking.
I was reminded of a (possibly apocryphal) story of a conference organized without any events in it, particularly—the whole thing was made out of interstitial things (drink hours, meet-and-greets—but no actual presentations or workshops), and how it was a raving success. (I can't seem to find the source on this—I thought it was a Hans Ulrich Obrist quip, but no leads there.) It's going to be a scattered summer, where I live in Berkeley but work in both an office park in Santa Cruz and on a boat in San Pablo Bay. The interstitial moments—drives around the greater Bay Area—are going to be the only quiet time.
Space is a tool for thinking with, and car dashboards are a particularly common case of a densely-wrought spatial interface for a particular task. I think most car dashboards post-2000 or so are garbage, where designs get more plastic-ey and electronically-controlled. I feel lucky that my 2002 Subie's dashboard is still dominated by physical buttons and knobs. I drive a manual and highly recommend it, if you want to be focused and put to use all four limbs while you drive. It's way more fun. More control and the demand of more of your attention brings driving closer to "flow" territory. Mostly I just want my dashboard to vanish. If you know a manual-transmission car well, you also know that you barely need a tachometer—it can all be handled through foot feel.
I went through a phase as a kid where all I wanted to draw were dashboards—for cars, spaceships, and otherwise. Some of this later translated into LEGO builds. I loved following Car Interiors when I was on tumblr, and am pleasantly surprised today to find it still going. I think dashboards are fascinating because there are just so many design decisions packed into them—decisions about texture, density of information display, which of the car's systems need management—and it all has to be visible from one vantage point.
(Deep LEGO cut for anyone listening: I still think Mladen Pejic's multiped mecha are the shit, and the cockpit arrangements are a major component of that...)
Thinking about multi-sensory interfaces for complex systems is one of the only things that gets me excited about AR/VR. I'm still shocked that surfing the web has the same interface as writing an essay (chair, screen, keyboard); I wish it felt more like driving a high-performance sports car.
Throwing the clutch,
Lukas
I'm the child of my father (a Detroiter) and product of the American Midwest, which is to say, I enjoy the act of driving and don't really flinch at long hours on the road. May was a really dynamic month, and I've appreciated lots of solo time on beautiful and well-maintained California roads to reflect, collect thoughts, and just look out at the world with the window rolled down. We will see if I still find the drives refreshing by the end of the Summer, but for now, I love my car and I treat it like a little pod for thinking.
I was reminded of a (possibly apocryphal) story of a conference organized without any events in it, particularly—the whole thing was made out of interstitial things (drink hours, meet-and-greets—but no actual presentations or workshops), and how it was a raving success. (I can't seem to find the source on this—I thought it was a Hans Ulrich Obrist quip, but no leads there.) It's going to be a scattered summer, where I live in Berkeley but work in both an office park in Santa Cruz and on a boat in San Pablo Bay. The interstitial moments—drives around the greater Bay Area—are going to be the only quiet time.
Space is a tool for thinking with, and car dashboards are a particularly common case of a densely-wrought spatial interface for a particular task. I think most car dashboards post-2000 or so are garbage, where designs get more plastic-ey and electronically-controlled. I feel lucky that my 2002 Subie's dashboard is still dominated by physical buttons and knobs. I drive a manual and highly recommend it, if you want to be focused and put to use all four limbs while you drive. It's way more fun. More control and the demand of more of your attention brings driving closer to "flow" territory. Mostly I just want my dashboard to vanish. If you know a manual-transmission car well, you also know that you barely need a tachometer—it can all be handled through foot feel.
I went through a phase as a kid where all I wanted to draw were dashboards—for cars, spaceships, and otherwise. Some of this later translated into LEGO builds. I loved following Car Interiors when I was on tumblr, and am pleasantly surprised today to find it still going. I think dashboards are fascinating because there are just so many design decisions packed into them—decisions about texture, density of information display, which of the car's systems need management—and it all has to be visible from one vantage point.
(Deep LEGO cut for anyone listening: I still think Mladen Pejic's multiped mecha are the shit, and the cockpit arrangements are a major component of that...)
Thinking about multi-sensory interfaces for complex systems is one of the only things that gets me excited about AR/VR. I'm still shocked that surfing the web has the same interface as writing an essay (chair, screen, keyboard); I wish it felt more like driving a high-performance sports car.
Throwing the clutch,
Lukas