A service design project to solve road rage by improving drivers' experience and lowering their premiums. We monitor their driving data and analyse their driving habits in order to develop their driving skills and reduce their road rage. Based on the driver's daily performance, the less road rage detected, the lower premiums you will pay.
Zhengwei Shao
Our projec is about using service design to address road rage and future mobility.
We are Zhengwei and Yuehui. We will follow our design process, the double diamond model, to talk about our project.
First, we want you to think about that have you ever seen in life or on social media: a driver keeps honking for slow traffic? Or a driver shouts, swears, and hits the steering wheel because of being cut in line? Or a driver goes crazy, and the car becomes a weapon, causing damage on the road?
All these scenarios are about road rage, which means anger or violent behaviour caused by someone else's bad driving or the stress of being in heavy traffic.
Road rage could be defined into 4 stages. From the slightest annoyance stage where most people get annoyed and show non-threatening gestures; to the most extreme rage stage which is related to criminal offences, like using weapons or hunting a vehicle. We would love to focus more on stage 2, frustration, which is quite common, including tailgating or honking etc., while those real actions may escalate the issue, we aim to avoid that to happen.
We interviewed 14 drivers in London, including professional and non-professional drivers. We found that most drivers get angry more or less regardless of gender and age because the traffic is usually out of their expectation in terms of time, driving manner...
Here is a story about road rage:
After empathising with irritable drivers, we found there are two kinds of road rage: personal and environmental. A driver could be affected by one individual or many causes. Most causes, like age or personality, are difficult to change, while we hope to make an impact on other causes like driving experience, perception, and limited communication...By doing this, we want to intervene in those causes and reduce their negative effects on drivers to prevent them from anger.
Different causes make up thousands of road rage scenes. For example, traffic jams can cause serious road rage because of surprising road work and a tight deadline.
From those road rage scenes, we found the 3 underlying causes of road rage.
Then it comes to our Problem statement.
If we want drivers to reduce road rage, we need to learn about road rage and make drivers more aware of that. Firstly, what can we do to detect road rage?
According to Euro New Car Assessment Programme, which is an independent organisation that evaluates new cars' safety, Driver Monitoring System (DMS) is now a requirement for any new car model launched on the European market from January 2023. For older cars, they can be installed with DMS as well.
Now DMS is used for assessing the driver's alertness and warning the driver if needed. However, shortly, infrared cameras can also be used for analysing drivers' emotions with more advanced facial expression tracking software and higher image processing capability.
Based on those, firstly DMS is now required on all new car models, secondly, DMS can be used for analysing driver's emotions, so technically it is feasible to detect road rage. This is useful for helping them to be aware of road rage and reduce it later.
When thinking of how to reduce road rage, we also fantasized about the world of autonomous cars. When all cars can drive themselves, there would be no human drivers and corresponding road rage. Now most cars are between Level 1 and Level 2 autonomous driving, which means most vehicles only achieved "hands off". Our project has many years ahead to provide a better experience for drivers. And we could help them to reduce the conflicts of different levels of autonomous cars and gradually adapt to automation.
We researched different stakeholders like car companies, automation developers, family and friends and so on.
We found that there is more value in insurance, because it can be a big cost for a driver, and road rage is a significant factor in premiums.
Then we summarised our research findings into our persona, irritable drivers who want lower insurance premiums.
Here is the ecosystem of our service
We use DMS or fitted devices to monitor driving so that drivers can share data with
insurers. Then drivers can get driving advice, understand their driving habits, and improve their driving behaviours. *The less road rage detected and the advice you get, the more reliable you are.* Finally, the insurer will provide lower premiums for the better-performing drivers.
If a driver shows good driving behaviours and commitment, they can be Road Relax Honoured Drivers. It is a very cool award, and only very polite and rational drivers can get it. Then they can drive with an exclusive sticker on their cars, representing they are approved, awarded, and respected drivers.
There is a second incentive structure, reward points.
Drivers can decide whether the shared data is to be used for further development of intelligent mobility or not. If a driver agrees with that, he can get reward points which could be redeemed for after-market service, like car washing and charging.
Also, if a driver becomes an honoured driver, he can earn exclusive bonus points, which means we encourage a driver to try his best to reduce road rage, improve driving habits, and become an honoured driver.
We prototyped our idea through user interviews, a lo-fi UI user test, and an expert interview.
