Discovering new product opportunities for an autonomous future
In the future when autonomous vehicles (AVs) are able to reach level 4 and 5 autonomy and no longer need a driver to see the road to drive the car, what are the future needs of automotive lighting?
The stakes couldn’t be higher for SL Lighting, a Tier 1 parts supplier for the likes of GM and Ford, whose future business model relies on shifting to meet the needs of our autonomous future.
2018
With the eminent future of autonomous vehicles, the automotive industry is trying to prepare for the oncoming disruption. One question that was top of mind for SL Corp, one of the worlds largest manufacturers of automotive lighting, was why would people want lights on their cars if the cars would be the ones doing the driving?
- Co-creation workshops
- User and expert interviews
- Client stakeholder workshop
- Design thinking
- Industrial design concept creation
- User experience concept creation
Because fully autonomous vehicles don’t exist in the market, our approach to better understanding this future state was consulting with industry experts as well as running co-creation workshops with participants to provide them with the opportunity to articulate what their future use cases could be..
Through multiple one on one interviews and co-creation workshops with people of all ages, we were able to begin to better understand the latent user needs of people relative to autonomous vehicles. Below are some insightful and inspiring quotes from people who informed the lens of product desirability.
After gathering primary and secondary research we synthesized a lot of the key insights and began to see general trends of how different categories of lighting would evolve over time as a result of the introduction of self driving cars.
2018
As the technology solution was beginning to take shape we coordinated the production of several appearance models to evaluate color, material and finishes of the devices while also coordinating a photography shoot with a variety of different models in order to begin to visualize how the Link would look and feel on people. These images ended up being utilized by Neuralink for their main media push.
model Wearing the N1 Appearance model
ridesharing ID
AUGMENTED TURNING SIGNALS
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During the project, we ran collaborative workshops with some of SL’s key client stakeholders at GM and Ford to understand their priorities. Armed with a breadth of concepts that had been vetted through different prototyping tools, SL was able to engage with car brands on a deeper level about the future market and evolving customer needs