4 November 2013
By Mark Wilson.
Texting while driving kills more people than drunk driving. Yet most of us are probably guilty of the transgression: Your iPhone chirps. You glance around at the traffic. Then you make a quick grab for the cupholder to read the message. And in the worst cases, you might even message back.
Are we all guilty? Sure. But we’re also stuck inside a design problem, according to Joey Cofone and Michael Vanderbyl, who’ve created an elegant conceptual solution to our lack of self-discipline called Car Mode. Rather than distracting us with constant, alluring notifications, Car Mode gimps your iPhone in the name of safety.
The system is activated passively, going into Car Mode as soon as the iPhone pairs with your car’s Bluetooth system. From here, you can take hands-free calls or follow turn-by-turn navigation in the same manner as always. But when someone sends you a text message, they’ll be notified that you’re currently driving. Meanwhile, the phone won’t alert you in any way–no bleeps or buzzes or onscreen alerts. Instead, when you exit the car or turn off the ignition, a summary screen will greet you with any and all messages you’d missed.
GETTING A TEXT IN BETWEEN FORKFULS OF PASTA DOESN’T KILL YOU. GETTING A TEXT WHILE DRIVING CAN.
Despite that it’s just a concept, the team worked within the API and UI logic of iOS 7. “It was important that we stick to the infrastructure already created and apply it across our concept,” Cofone tells Co.Design. “This way new users can immediately feel familiar with the new functions and seamlessly apply them to their life.”
And Car Mode really is seamless–so seamless, in fact, that it makes us wonder if contextual user interface could drive a better iPhone experience across the board. After all, iOS already allows users to disable some functions on planes or block calls late at night. What if these shifts were modeled more after Car Mode, and with a lot more frequency?
“Dinner Mode may sound like a good idea–no more distractions when you’re eating with your family–but getting a text in between forkfuls of pasta doesn’t kill you,” Cofone jokes. “Getting a text while driving can.”
COULD THE IPHONE BE A DEVICE THAT’S CONSTANTLY TAILORING ITSELF TO AN ENVIRONMENT?
Even still, the potential that Car Mode brings to mind is about so much more than texting. Could the iPhone be a device that’s constantly tailoring itself to an environment, keeping quiet in a movie theater while streamlining price comparisons and calorie counts at a supermarket? Could the phone go a step further, and know what you’re holding at a store to provide more information about it, or recognize you’re at a concert and automatically push you tweets from other people at that concert?
There’s no reason why any of these things aren’t possible, or even a bit probable, now or in the near future. But the beauty of Car Mode is that it tunes much of the world out, while contextual technologies may likely tune even more of the world in.
Car Mode won first place at the recent AIGA Command X competition, where Vanderbyl served as Cofone’s designer mentor.
