Case Study: Flink
How will you remote control you autonomous taxi?
Case Study
Flink is a design concept for the mobile app of an imaginary cab service with fully autonomous vehicles.
This case study takes a look into the future and looks at challenges that may arise when using this technology.
Contributions
Sophia Morawitz:
- Copywriting
Karsten Kreh:
- Branding
- Graphic Design
- App Design
Launched
2019
The Challenge
Automotive automobiles are one of the major subjects of our time in the field of technology, transportation and artificial intelligence. Machines have become more and more intelligent and independent, but they still lack many basic human characteristics that we take for granted. We have not yet succeeded in teaching a machine such a thing as "common sense".A human taxi driver knows that it is sometimes easier to get off a car 10 metres away from an exact location and notices, when a passenger forgot to take his luggage out of the trunk.
Well-designed, intuitively usable software should prevent these communication difficulties and enable the smoothest possible handling of this new type of technology. Exactly this challenge was set in a university project within the scope of my studies. The task was to build an app that would allow an autonomous taxi to be completely remote controlled.
Approach
It felt a bit like a theater rehearsal as we went through the various use cases in a living room, with an imaginary car that consisted of four dining table chairs, using our app prototype, which we had designed using Adobe Xd. This way, we wanted to make sure that we considered the key action steps and potential issues that might arise when using this new technology.
From the documentation of this exercise and arising problems, we created user stories, which were subsequently incorporated into the design of user routes in several revisions. This way we created a rough, holistic design concept of an app for controlling the fully automated cab service.
Without a logo and a name, an app concept like this would of course be a bit boring, which is why we gave the app a decent corporate design and a small style guide.
By the way, we really don't know how the founders of a certain German food delivery service were able to find this case study a year later, but we don't blame them for being inspired by our name.
To showcase the playful freedom that the logo concept offers, we also designed smaller advertising graphics that could be used for marketing this app.