Shapeshifting rotary Controller v2

As part of the Future Experience team within Harman X, one of the most impactful projects I worked on was the refinement of our Shapeshifting Rotary Controller in collaboration with a major European automotive company, in which I took on the role of Project Lead. Due to time pressure from the OEM to show at an internal tech show, the project had six weeks to go from a slide deck I presented of the concept (which won the business), to a fully polished high-fidelity prototype.

The Shapeshifting Rotary Controller is a interface device that reduces the distraction of a driver through the colocation of input and output. The device leverages the proprioceptive modality which improves the load-balancing of the driver’s senses, while concurrently enabling them to not have to divert their eye-gaze from the road in order to interact with their HMI.

This iteration of the Shapeshifting Rotary Controller was specifically given the constraint of “practicality”, in that only a single servo may be used to drive the device. Therefore, I decided the focus should be on change in size, as opposed to shape, to communicate the most information intuitively, and practically.

My responsibilities for this project included:

• Daily participation with an external mechanical engineering contractor, including brainstorming, critiquing, and managing

• Bringing up an ad-hoc UI Design team (Visual Designers and a UI Engineer) to create the HMI’s digital interface, and serving as the design lead

• Individually contributing to and managing the prototyping and backend engineering team

• Integrating our prototype into the industrial design components created by the OEM

• Delivering and demoing the final prototype