In our everyday live we are constantly sorrounded by interfaces. They come in all sizes and shapes and demand different interactions in different contexts.

Car Stereos are (a perfect example for human-computer interaction) one of those interfaces we use quiet frequently but often perceive them as hard to understand and rather not intuitive. As the rise of the multimedia Infotainment systems flooded our cars with big screens and touch panels we thought we would like to go a few steps back and only use the primary functions of a Car Stereo — listening to your favourite music while driving.

We asked several users and shadowed ourselves during the research phase about the usage of car stereos and we noticed quickly that the amounts of information and typography displayed on modern touchscreens are requiring more attention than they should.

We wanted to explore in this study how much we could reduce screen and physical components into an understandable (+ maybe intuitive) system, meaning that only main functions are accessible and the visual appearance is only displaying the main information. It should be usable via the touchscreen or two hard knobs in order to serve while watching the streets in front of you.

With the focus on musical enjoyment the goal was to create a music-affine interface. Elements from the fields of music production to sound synthesis were adopted and put into a different context.

We built an iPad Prototype witch Googles Pixate, as at that state it was easily learned and executed. As soon as we touched the limitations of this framework we started making After Effect animations which were than embedded in the Pixate prototype in order to fake micro animations.