Get In: The Connected Vehicle Podcast From BlackBerry (Episode 7)

Podcast Transcript

Steve Kovsky:

Hi, welcome to Get In: The Connected Vehicle Podcast from BlackBerry. I'm your host, Steve Kovsky and with this series, we'll be diving into what the future of transportation just might look like. Today, I'm happy to be joined by somebody who's helping shape that future of transportation and the experience that we're all going to have in our automobiles, in hopefully the near future. I'm going to let him introduce himself. Gavin, would you please tell us a little bit about yourself and your company?

Gavin Johnson:

Thanks for inviting us on -- really exciting to be part. I'm Gavin Johnson, design director at a company called Active Matter. We're a customer experience agency, really looking at the user experience through lots of different sectors of design, from automotive, right across the board into lots of different sectors, which we can dig into. My role is really looking at bringing a user-centered approach to design and technology and how the two elements fuse around the human, in the process.

Steve Kovsky:

One of the things we like to ask our guests on this show is, what was your first user experience behind the wheel of an automobile? How has that changed? Can you remember back?

Gavin Johnson:

Absolutely. That's a great question. The first car I bought was a Fiat Panda back in the day. I don't know if you are aware of the Fiat Panda, but it was a pretty utilitarian vehicle at the time. One of the things I remember most was it had deck-chair seats with canvas slung between two poles, which made it utilitarian. It was kind of base, but interestingly, thinking of the design of that vehicle, it was designed by Giorgetto Giugiaro, a fantastic designer and industrial designer, certainly in the automated industry. 

He set up Italdesign and designed the likes of the MK1 Golf for VW, worked with Aston Martin, worked across Ferrari, really great pedigree. In fact, he designed the DeLorean. If you are of a certain age, you always dreamt of having a DeLorean, myself included, after watching Back to the Future, many times in my youth. The DeLorean was the thing to have. He worked across the board on lots of brilliantly designed automotive products.

The really interesting thing I found from that experience and from coming from a design perspective, is that he designed so many things – design crosses lots of borders. He designed the Nikon camera, motorcycles, wrist watches, and actually designed a specific type of pasta. Really interesting guy – he was voted the automotive designer of the century back in 1999. I like to think I owned one of his pieces of work – it happened to be a Panda, but that auto was part of a utilitarian phase.

For me and my first car, the thing I remember most about it was the experiences it gave me. That's an interesting thought process. It was a time when it was more about the car, more about the freedom – the emotional connection I had with that automobile and the freedom it gave me. I think my first trip was heading off to the beach and dropping those canvas seats back with a couple of mates and sleeping over and the freedom it gave me.

Over the years, the cars I've had have gotten better with more technology and certainly more comfort in them. Thinking about my car today, it does a lot of things for me. It'll park for me. It keeps me a safe distance away from whatever's in front of me. It'll keep me on the straight and narrow or the curve, depending on what I'm doing. With all the technology that's happened since that point, we've got more comfort, more safety, more features, and more functions. It's become a really experiential point. Working with and understanding some of the elements of technology coming on right now with the likes of BlackBerry IVY™, it’s allowing a real connected experience. I feel we're at a real tipping point of a new experience, and the things that will change in the coming years will be really impactful to the human experience.

Steve Kovsky:

Well, we're very interested in talking about that tipping point. I wonder how your experience of the car and think you're absolutely right – it's where those cars took us and who was in the car. Those are the things that you remember, much more than the discomfort.

Gavin Johnson:

Absolutely.

Steve Kovsky:

Perhaps. Or having to roll down the window by hand. Things like that, those sort of fade into the distance. We do remember the experience we had in those automobiles and in that transportation. Do you think that's going to change as cars do more for us, that we're going to feel less connected to the car – or more?

Gavin Johnson:

All the technology that gets added to the car is almost a two-edge sword. It gives us real power at our fingertips, but it also takes away some of the feeling that you're driving, that you're in control, and engaged in an adventurous activity. Thinking back to my days when I first started driving, it was an adventure. You were heading out almost to the unknown. 

That's very different today because I know where I'm going. I know my car's telling me where to go and it's telling me where not to go and when to start and when to stop and when to recharge, et cetera. That's a fantastic technical achievement and brings leaps and bounds to the human experience across there, but I think there is something about the sheer pleasure of driving, of being in control, of going into the unknown, that maybe is slightly different today than it was of the past, for sure.

Steve Kovsky:

Well, there's also those occasional, hopefully very occasional moments of sheer terror that we experience behind the wheel that are memorable as well. Hopefully those will fade with all of the capabilities of the car, that it's going to extend our lives. There is a trade off. How are you and your agency trying to shape those future experiences so that people do connect with their car, they connect with that brand, so it's something that they value? What are some of the kind of design imperatives that you're working toward?

Gavin Johnson:

We're very focused around human-centered design. I think human-centered design has come front of mind for a lot of companies. When we started, 10 or 15 years ago, looking at human-centered design, it was a low priority for a lot of companies. Technology was the lead driver in some of the products. I think that's changed a lot, certainly in the last few years. Technology enabled that change as well.

The prevalence of connected cars allows you the opportunity to try things out, to shape your experiences to the user and the changing user. I worked on a project for several automated companies, where the technology within the car was a five-year cycle of that car's development, and the technology that was in the modern car was already five years, 10 years out of date sometimes, before it hit the production line. Today, I think the technology has allowed us to have connected cars where experiences can change and they can change over time. They can reshape around that user with over the air updates, which is amazing. That brought the whole industry, from a design perspective, leaps and bounds in the last five years or so, to the experiences that we've got today, which are some amazing experiential design.

I certainly think technology is driving that forward. From our role where we are looking at making sure that those technologies are really centered around what humans really want to do and want to have from their vehicles and expect from their vehicles as well. Can the vehicle understand the diary of that driver and have they had a busy day, and what does that mean? Do we want to re-route them to a nice trip along the beach on the way home so they're nice and refreshed when they get home to see their kids? We know that Wednesdays are a particularly busy day for them, so can we build that kind of personalization into these experiences and give a connection to the driver that's really fulfilling in their life and perhaps puts a different perspective on the vehicle and what that means to people?

I kind of see that with technology, such as BlackBerry IVY™, you are almost getting a personal assistant, more than a vehicle. I see that experience where the car can recognize that you are on a trip. It can identify that there are kids in the car. You are on a trip that's spanning a lunchtime, maybe it can book you a table at a restaurant on the way, just when the kids are getting "hangry." We all know those points in time. I certainly do. It can adjust that booking when depending on the traffic that you are in, it could take your order, give it to chef so you get your meal when you arrive. Whilst you are fueling the family, it can fuel itself. As you drive off, it can pay for everything itself. I think that very human experience, which is quite different to a mobility experience, is a new relationship we are going to have with our vehicles.

That's a really interesting point to see, what does that mean to people and how do we design that experience, so it makes sense to people and it's comfortable for people and that we are trusting that experience? I see certainly a big need for designing for trust and it's designing for people's expectations of what their vehicles can do. Now, they're doing these very different things that we're not used to. They're paying for stuff themselves. 

They're paying for the toll roads as we drive through. How do we know that they have been paid? How do we confirm that? All of the things that we're very much used to doing, the vehicle's going to do for us. There's a lot of design around that experience that helps people understand our new relationship with vehicles and how that is moving forward. Certainly at a really interesting time, and some really interesting challenges and amazing technology that's coming on stream.

Steve Kovsky:

Well, it's fascinating because some of the things that you're describing, are beyond what most of us know that we want in a car. We don't even know that cars can do these things. Many of the activities that you're talking about, we might not even be aware that the car is doing it for us, but we will be delighted by the results. I'm interested in the process. How do you anticipate these needs that the consumers don't even know that they have, these wants that they don't even really recognize themselves yet, and design that into a vehicle? It seems fascinating to me.

Gavin Johnson:

A human-centered approach to the design that we do, and really that is about drivers looking at users of vehicles, looking at people in general. I mean, we do a lot of empathy mapping, so really understanding people's lives. I think that the starting point in this technology, is to understand people's lives and how does my product fit within that life? We'll look at drivers, we'll observe drivers, we'll observe them in the car and how they interact in the car. We'll observe them out of car and what they're doing in their lives. Then, we'll look at mapping that journey out.

Quite often, people will forgive technology. They'll say, "Oh, I can't use this." For example, mapping in a vehicle and navigation, quite often you'll observe people blaming themselves for technology, which is maybe not up to par. I think navigation, in my perspective, in my opinion, base OEM navigation isn't up to the Google and the Apple way. I know from my experiences, my own personal experience, that if I want to get somewhere and I want to feel comfortable getting there, I'll plug my iPhone® in and I'll use CarPlay® to get to that destination. I won't use my native mapping application. It's something that I trust. Maybe I don't trust my internal navigation so much.

What we'd like to do is with that observation, with that empathy, with the kind of journey mapping, is see what stories come out of that. I think from my perspective, when you collect enough stories, you start to see patterns in those stories, and then you can find those patterns of the things you either need to fix, or you need to celebrate. You might find amazing things in stories that you never realized that your customers were using your product for, or you might find that there's a lot of people talking, within their stories, about certain aspects where you realize, "Actually, this is maybe something we can clean up, we can soften the edges of, we need to focus on in that." As humans, we're all attuned to telling stories and understanding stories. That's where the real truths come out.

We'd certainly collect stories and look for stories. That's a foundation point for our design work when we're looking at prototyping solutions. We'll start with base level stories and understanding where the issues might be. That's where we come at it from a design perspective, is to start with the human, understand them, and then start to design out prototypes. We'd like to quickly test, get something in front of people as well. I think, again, that there's an increase these days of rapid prototyping. There are lots of tools available now for us to rapidly prototype, but it's really key to design, to put that in front of people and to gauge their reactions quickly, then iterate on that and build on that.

Whereas, perhaps times in times of old, where there were more six-month, 12- month design cycles that we perhaps weren't used to. I think that those days are very much in the past now. It's about rapid iteration, but I would certainly say design is a real key aspect to that. We come across a lot of brilliant technical solutions, which when in our experience, when they're put in front of customers, they either are very complex because the design layer hasn't been added to them yet. They perhaps don't garner an accurate kind of representation of what that technology can do. Whereas, I think we start off from, I would say that being a designer, if you start off with a solid design foundation to your thinking, you can really gain some valuable insight from customers because a well-designed product should be easy to use. It should fit within their lives.

To quote another fantastic designer, "Good design is as little design as possible." I think there's a danger as well to a degree, certainly in lots of areas, but automotive not as much as anywhere, is that things get over designed. Again, there's lots of richness. There's huge screens in our cars now. Screens are getting bigger. Screens are taking over. They need design, but also we should focus on great design being as little design as possible to get the user to use that feature, use that function in the most frictionless way possible. That's our philosophy around creating something that's as seamless, gets the job done, meets the need, hits that emotional boundary with as little design as possible, with what can we design out, is as much as what can we design in, is a key aspect.

Steve Kovsky:

Well, there's a story that you told me when we first spoke that – and I'm a big believer in stories as well – but this is an engagement that I believe you've been having with a luxury brand, and talk about frictionless. This is somebody getting from point A to point B, not necessarily all in the automobile, they're also integrating other forms of transportation, but how to make that as comfortable and as seamless as possible. Could you tell me a little bit about that experience for the traveler and how you're designing that?

Gavin Johnson:

We started with the concept and the auto manufacturer really wanted to understand, the lifetime value of a customer and what could that be? This follows a lot of technical platforms now. A customer is perhaps more than an owner of your vehicle now, they're connected into your ecosystem. What we started to think about, "Well, okay. If I was the owner of the OEM, what I want my company to be doing for me?" Maybe I think about it in that way. Maybe I think about, "Okay, I'm on a trip through Europe, for example, I need to get to a destination. I go down to my garage. I take the car out the drive and hit the road, and I've got everything set up how I want it to be set up, but maybe there's traffic on the way and there's bad weather on the way. I need to get to my destination."

There's snow, let's say in Canada today, "I'm blocked. I can pull up my vehicle. I can then pick up public transportation. I can get a train. I can travel the next couple of hundred miles on the train. I can get off my train and pick up my next vehicle from the same manufacturer that's got all of my settings set up how I like to have them. I'm listening to my favorite BlackBerry® podcasts. I pick up where I left off and I get in the vehicle and it's the same. I'm traveling along. Maybe I get to the airport, I'm flying to the U.S. I can pick up where I left off. I make my flights. I land and the concierge gives me the key to a new vehicle. Again, it's completely set up to how I want it. I get to my destination, have my meeting, and I can drive back."

The thought of what would an experience be like in a total mobility lifecycle that's around the human and how they want to act, the car is part of that experience, but maybe it's not a single car. Maybe it's a connected set of vehicles that I have access to. What would that look like? We started to look at that experience and think about all the other things that might happen if my car has detected a mechanical fault, "I'm going to break down. It directs me to a place to pull over where another car is waiting for me that I can just zip over and carry on my journey. It all gets settled when I get back home."

This one way of looking at a customer value chain for the organization that, "Okay, maybe I'm brought into that service. Maybe I'm a lot more connected to that service, and maybe I don't want to just then sell my car after so many years and buy another brand, because actually I'm quite invested in this connected system. It gives me everything that I need and perhaps more than I need."

There are certainly, moving forward, looking at the automobile ownership and the ownership model and what that looks like. Maybe, a lot of statistics around gen Z not wanting to own products, own vehicles and expensive products. What does that look like? How do we, as an industry sector, fit our offering around their lives and be very human centered in that approach. That's a running theme for us, but that human-centered approach kind of touches not only usage and the features and functions that you might want in your vehicle, but what's the ownership model like, "Do I subscribe to this service?" Is that different to ownership models? It may allow me to swap and change the type of vehicle I have in the city. "I don't want a big car, but maybe on longer trips I do." Maybe I can swap in and out of different models of a certain brand, based on what I want to do with that and based on my journey and my specific needs.

We certainly look at a lot of these types of thinking processes, prototyping concepts, really to understand how we fit our offering around the changing consumer and what they want. Technology has a big part in that, but also services, solutions, what other things can you add to this service that makes me an owner of this brand and a real brand advocate that's beyond, "I'm a BMW owner, or an Audi owner, or a Mercedes owner," for example, maybe I'm deeper connected because I've bought into this ecosystem and I have real value and that organization is giving me real value to my life. That's what I value most from my vehicle.

Steve Kovsky:

Well, it's a very attractive prospect. I can see having that experience turn you into a devotee of that brand. You become an owner of that brand for life, why would you want to do anything else?

Gavin Johnson:

I suppose for me, one of the beauties of technology is, it's quite a leveler as well. A lot of brands, there's not so much differentiation in engineering for example, a lot of brands have fantastic engineering across the board. How do we hook people into our brand, and offer them something that's bigger than the vehicle that they're buying into as well?

Steve Kovsky:

Gavin, looking at some of the trends that are happening. One of the things that I think is really fascinating about the examples that you've given, is all of those are really technologically entirely possible today. We're not talking about flying cars, we don't need full scale, autonomous driving vehicles to make any of these happen. It's really about having the will to do this level of integration, and applying perhaps artificial intelligence and some of these technologies that are available. so that your car really ends up knowing you better than you know yourself, and just provides these delightful experiences on a daily basis. As we look at some of the coming trends, autonomous vehicles, electrification, software defined vehicles, what do you think are some of the most promising gems there, and how are they going to transform our future experience in the next, say, three to five years?

Gavin Johnson:

Certainly for me, understanding that AI element of vehicles and getting the vehicle to really understand you as a person and connect with you as a person, is a really exciting point in time. It's going to certainly change, as we mentioned before, change the experience, our expectations of the vehicle, and what it does for us. Thinking about design and the experience that AI is, we're confident in the AI, that we understand what the AI's doing. Thinking about self-driving cars, I know Tesla are doing some brilliant work about how you visualize what their AI is thinking, so that the human in the car isn't shocked at what happens and is not surprised. Surprise is not something that you necessarily want when you're driving. Or you're in a car that's driving you -- you don't want to be surprised at what it does. I think there's some kind of great work there.

It feels to me like there's a lot of time that we're going to spend in our cars. Vehicle dwell time is going to be a thing that happens. That might be a lot of time in cars doing non-driving activity and that might be waiting for it to charge, for example, what are we going to do in that space? Fast charging will change a lot of that, but there's still going to be time that where that happens. Also, with driverless cars or certainly getting toward autonomous driving, there's going to be a lot of time where we're in vehicle, not doing the classical driving activity, but also there's a bunch of other people in the vehicle as well, there's passengers, what's their experience like? There's exciting things that will happen here.

That kind of prevalence of screens, of a connected experience, of thinking about how you buy into a vehicle. I know at CX, that Sony brought out a vehicle with fantastic screens and sound. You can imagine the new Sony movie getting first released on their network of VISION-S and being a completely connected experience, that would be something you might buy into. There's a lot of great things coming on board and coming on stream. I guess the really exciting thing for me, is around how we interact with all of that, with all of that information, with all of that time that we have, what do we do with that? Is it going to be more entertaining? How do we connect with those cars, going right back to that very first kind of thought about the vehicle being an enabler for me to go and have an adventure, how do we reconnect that adventure to the cars of tomorrow?

That's an opportunity for lots of companies to think about that adventure and how we build that connection back into the car. "What's it going to do for me? How am I going to connect to that experience?" Those real, interesting human traits and exciting times where the technology can do almost anything for us and, as you say, the car will understand us more than we understand ourselves. That brings some amazing creative opportunities.

I feel like new players will come into the market as well. New creative players that maybe, with the technologies that we have now, with the openness, for example, the BlackBerry IVY platform can bring in perhaps new players that have been excluded before, because they didn't have access to technology. What could we do with that? If we brought in new creative minds and new creative thinking, what possibilities might come out of that experience? If we thought about the car beyond the transportation in its own rights, what could we do with it and what are the possibilities there? There's some really interesting experiential opportunities across the board to bring in, that will be opened up by the technology coming in tomorrow's vehicles, today's vehicles in a lot ways.

Steve Kovsky:

I'm excited to see what companies like Active Matter come up with next to delight us as consumers, and also to solve problems for the vehicle manufacturers and for infrastructure and for all the different players that now are going to be having these conversations within our vehicles and outside our vehicles, bringing us those new experiences. Thank you very much for sharing how your firm works, how your mind works, and how these things are going to shape the new experience of the software defined vehicle.

Gavin Johnson:

It's a pleasure. Again, thanks for inviting us on. It's been really, really great to talk to you. It's going to be an exciting time moving forward for us all. Thank you.

Steve Kovsky:

Well, that's the end of our episode for today, but if you'd like to get more information on the topics or our guest, check out blackberry.com/podcast. Get In: The Connected Vehicle Podcast from BlackBerry is available wherever you get your podcasts. Don't forget to subscribe to keep up to date with our latest episodes.