Emotional car buddy

Why

From the moment you enter the car to the moment you arrive at your destination, your daily driving journey is full of expected and unexpected events. While driving down familiar roads, you may encounter pedestrians, service vehicles, bikes, and other drivers. You yourself will deal with different emotions in every drive. Maybe you?re excited about your destination, or giddy because something nice happened before you set off. You may be thinking about an important meeting you have today that makes you nervous. Someone may just have cut you off in traffic when you were trying to turn. In short, even if you know your route by heart, every time you set off in your car is an opportunity to experience a wide range of emotions.

What

The Emotional Car Buddy (ECB) encourages you to be more present with the emotions you experience on the road. Becoming aware of your feelings and managing them can have a beneficial effect on your well-being, safety, and overall driving experience. With empathy and genuineness, the ECB uses different parts of your car environment, like your dashboard, your steering wheel, and your rearview mirror, to help you navigate your feelings during your commutes and promote a present state of mind. It will help you stay calm when you are challenged by bad drivers and it will also celebrate your happiness, validating your emotions.

How

The ECB can add value in all stages of the complete driving experience, from entering the car to exiting again at our destination. In this exhibition, we show two of these interactions. The first interaction is happiness. Here, when the ECB senses your happiness, it will capture an image of the happy moment. After the journey, the ECB will share the pictures with you to help you reflect on your happy moment and be happy for longer. In another interaction, we focus on demonstrating how the ECB helps you navigate your anger. Whenever something that annoys or angers you happens, the ECB will jump in and respond for you. It will inflate the steering wheel to remind you to stay calm and will also mirror your anger. The ECB?s anger only disappears after you calm it down. This shift in attention can help you calm yourself down.

Interaction video