Filo Interior Design and User Interface . Stile Bertone
Exploring a digital interface inside a moving car
In 2000, during an internship at Stile Bertone (Caprie, near Turin, Italy), created part of the interface and interior design for Filo, Bertone's concept car for Salon del'Auto de Genève.
Filo concept innovation concept was an electronic drive they called 'drive by wire' which takes out from the interior the steering rod and other mechanical components and leaves much more free space.
My purpose was to think about the interior as a living space more than a driving cockpit full of instruments. An aesthetic of a space to be more than a space to control. My job was to design the door panel and develop the interface for climate, music player and navigator. All the visualisation of this controls were put in three displays in the front panel. Thinking about how we can interact with this stuff in a display while being inside a moving car wasn't a simple task. Touch-screen - that is the best solution till now - wasn't available in 2000 the way it is today. The use of GPS was also new.
On the door panel, together with the armrest, I designed a trackball to interact with the controls in the display. This kind of mouse allows thin and large movements and doesn't need a support area. The main idea was to roll over the map image and interact with it this way, instead of typing all the destination address, letter by letter. Temperature could be changed up and down rolling the trackball as the numbers indicators change in the display, as well as to roll and change radio stations or forward the album track.
It was great to have the opportunity to think about something so complex and new, as there wasn't a similar kind of known interface at that time and because it was part of the way this interface in fact evolved.
In the next year, BMW showed his novelty to this interface, which confirmed the way it will be developed (images in the bottom).
BMW navigation display and navigation controller (2002).