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As many industries focus on UX design, what surprises do Toyota's UX designers have in store?
What UX design means for a carmaker
As a student, the UX Design Group’s Touko Taga majored in graphics at an art college.
Taga
With the arrival of autonomous driving, recreating home entertainment spaces inside the car will not be overly difficult. However, ideas about what mobility should be will no doubt differ from person to person.
As a carmaker, we want to be a brand that people choose because we offer the added value of something fun.
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Going forward, the key will be to avoid commoditization by offering users the value of mobility plus something extra that creates an attachment between the car and the individual. Our challenge is to design a new relationship between people and cars.
Naturally, people find happiness in different places. For that reason, rather than mass-producing the same thing, Toyota’s approach is to embrace diversification and create high-mix, low-volume products on a vast scale. This is the idea behind the company’s vision of “producing happiness for all”
Designing cars to fall in love with
UX designers are constantly exploring what new experiences they can create.
Kato
When people come to own fully autonomous cars, we wonder whether they will feel an emotional attachment to these vehicles. If users aren’t driving the cars, we may need some other form of interaction to form that attachment.
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Concept cars such as the Fine-Comfort Ride and Concept-i above are part of efforts to design a new relationship between people and cars.
Kato
We wanted to create experience value unique to autonomous driving. For the Fine-Comfort Ride, in particular, we installed ceiling and underfoot lighting to create a new kind of relaxation experience akin to a meditation space and proposed using the side windows as a new form of communication.
As UX designers rack their brains trying to create new experiences, they are also designing ways to make people fall deeper in love with cars.
In the era of a momentous shift from cars to mobility, members with diverse skills must come together to raise the team’s overall design capability.
Ichikawa
At this time of once-in-a-century transformation, rapid advances in technology continue to redefine what’s possible. Knowing that we need to come up with new ideas to avoid being left behind is a great source of motivation.
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I hope one day people will want to drive a Toyota car to own the space it offers. We need to find out what that space will be, and I want to get there soon.
From start to finish, the UX designers talked excitedly about their role. Even as the future brings widespread change, Toyota’s designers remain committed to “human-centered” thinking.
Beyond the pursuit of comfort and safety, they strive to spark excitement on a subconscious level and cultivate an attachment to cars.
In their trial-and-error search for things that don’t yet exist, Toyota’s UX designers seem to be having the most fun of all.