There was a Wired News article today about drivers who want to reprogram their cars that reminded me of my friend Paul’s Prius.
Cars are still a novelty to me, and cars with 9’’ LCDs in them are still more novel (noveller?). But Paul has gotten over the shock of the new, and pointed out all sorts of features in the music interface that’d he be happy to add for himself...if there were some sort of accessible API. Which begs the question, “Well, why not?” Obviously, we might not want Paul reprogramming his brakes on the go. But it’s perfectly reasonable to build in some tools for customizing and extending one’s in-car media player. This is probably illegal, but let’s just entertain the idea for a moment.
“Car chippers” (modern day hotrodders) are hacking their Volkswagens and Corvettes for better performance. But since at this point Americans live in their cars, it seems like a short step towards also tinkering with the entertainment system to get more information about your CDs, to prompt you when your favorite dj is on, etc. This could be a terrible idea - do we really need more people futzing around with their radios at 65mph? But it’s not like the existing Prius screen design and functionality isn’t dangerously futzy already. “Why is there no pause button?” asked Paul. “Why is the volume control on the screen and the track forward-backward buttons on the dashboard?” I couldn’t really give him a good answer.
As the Wired article points out, there’s more at stake than just Paul’s CD collection. Cars are increasingly equipped with the processing power of PCs — but not the debugging capabilities. Instead, car manufacturers are designing cars that can only be troubleshot with the help of expensive scanners — which usually only car dealerships own. So they both take a bite out of the profits of independent mechanics, and force drivers to pay to get enigmatic warning lights diagnosed and turned off. It seems a little counterproductive. Why alienate your two most enthusiastic user populations (mechanics and car chippers) as well as a substantial population of less committed drivers who don’t want to pay $120 to get a minor fix every month or so?
The blurring of boundaries between automobile and PC brings new and troubling significance to the phrase “fatal error.” I’m on the point of buying a car, and anything that ratchets up my bill or my anxiety levels is a deal-breaker. I mean, if you were forced to spend $120 bimonthly to have an official Microsoft or Apple tech fix your computer, wouldn’t you consider that a major, major software problem? And if your computer didn’t tell you what the problem actually was but instead just flashed its LEDs enigmatically, wouldn’t that also be a major, major problem? So why is this somehow okay in a KIA?
Which leads me, inevitably, to the incipient dyspepsia that is the by-women, for-women Volvo concept car (hereafter ironically referred to as “FWBW”) Unlike cars with unhelpful and expensive warning lights, FWBW was apparently designed to completely frustrate any action the driver might take to maintain the car herself.
The whole front of the car is moulded in one piece which can be removed only by a Volvo mechanic. ... "Honestly, the only time I open the bonnet on my car is when I want to fill up washer fluid," said [Volvo designer] Tatiana Butovitsch Temm. ... The car should be programmed to discover any problems under the bonnet, then send a message to the garage to let them know. The mechanics would then contact the women directly to invite them over. "If the car says nothing, then everything is fine," said Ms Temm optimistically.
There’s definitely something odd about a set of car designers who have never had to get a jumpstart. I remember one terrible, horrible, no-good-very-bad day when I had to get two jumps within a 9-hour period, which makes me less optimistic. Also, I will not ask what you do if FWBW breaks down in, say, North Dakota, and there is no approved Volvo mechanic who can open the car up for four hours in any direction.
And I certainly will not consider the worries generated by an expensive and necessary machine that does not tell you when it’s sick but instead tells a businessperson who then charges you to tell you what’s wrong with it. Creating FTF interactions between the company and the consumer around routine maintenance is a nice idea, but there’s nothing very friendly about insisting upon them. Given the gendered role of car maintenance (at least in N. America), I remain more than a little uneasy about promoting female passivity and ignorance as a beneficial response to anxieties about unfamiliar machines. I don’t identify much with the hotrodder-carchipper vision of driver-as-hacker. But I identify even less with the Volvo vision of driver-as-child-to-be-led-by-an-expert-mechanic.
What’s driving my (somewhat extreme, I admit) snit about FWBW is a disagreement not just about methods, but about values. Having a hood you can’t open yourself is massively impractical — but it also embodies troubling assumptions about women, authority (whether of the mechanic or the car company), and trust. Temm et al remind me of the big problem with user-centered design - that it all depends on exposing and respecting the designers’ values as well as those of the user. Otherwise, you may be putting the user in the center of the design — but you’re also trapping her there.
I grew up reading mysteries and thrillers, so I can only think of FWBW as a product of Sherlock Holmes-style reasoning. Remember that quotation about eliminating the impossible, and being left with the improbable truth? “Impossible” is a handy deductive trick; it erases potential solutions because they do not accord with our understanding of the world. I don’t know how the designers of the concept car drew the boundaries between impossible and merely improbable. But when the result seems so extremely improbable, we perhaps need to redraw them. Value sensitive design, I’m thinking, is one way to do that — to remind myself at least that the questions we ask ourselves are not just about needs but necessarily also about the ways we imagine the “goodness” of our lives. And I know — this is the sort of conclusion that should just be an “of course.” Except that obviously, sometimes it’s not.
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