Client
Carnegie Mellon, School of Design
Description
A UX and Industrial design product created to tackle the rising issue of pedestrian safety and traffic education in urban areas.
Role
Designer and Researcher. In Collaboration with @Joseph-Kim
“In a perfect world, cautious drivers always watch out for pedestrians, and pedestrians always use crosswalks and sidewalks. But in the real world, commonsense rules aren’t enough to protect nearly 6,000 pedestrians from fatal car crashes every year.” - Kobi Morenko, CEO at Arbe
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Over 20-50 million major traffic incidents involving motor vehicles happen yearly. Out of these incidents, approximately 1.5 million resulted in immediate death on the spot, with many more occurring afterward. In these incidents, pedestrians are disproportionately affected as the most vulnerable party present on the roads.
Through our primary and secondary research, we have looked into the leading causes of these incidents and were able to conclude that pedestrian traffic safety is of valid concern in almost all areas globally, whether they are urban, suburban, or rural. From our findings, we were also able to identify young children and adolescents (6-13) and elderly citizens (55-65) as some of the most vulnerable groups within the demographic. These groups showed disproportionately higher rates of incidents and a higher rate of mortality once involved in said incidents.
Our proposed solution: A pedestrian traffic support device that syncs seamlessly with nearby architecture and smart phones to ensure an accurate and timely delivery of traffic safety information to pedestrians navigating both everyday and foreign routes.
With a focus on delivery of timely, hierarchy-based information, we can identify how to best communicate traffic and travel information to our users in the most informative and effective way possible. The use of familiar symbology and colors are embedded into the design, making it easily to understand immediately at a glance, even for those who rely on extensively accessible features, children, and the elderly.
On top of that, Obi is designed to serve primarily as a educational device/experience that fosters better habits and more conscious over time. This means that we envision a product to be a long-time companion to its user, including features such as keeping track of user’s habits and patterns over time, lessening and increasing alerts as necessary.
Obi’s level of guidance will develop over time along with the user’s age and confidence in road navigation, to provide an adaptable, flexible, and overall comfortable experience over time, to not just provide appropriate feedback and information cues, but also potentially user statistics will be available for review, and provide conductive learning opportunities and designated goals that accumulate into a more personalised journey. Holistically, we envision a plan in which the data gathered by Obi devices on an individual level will feed it back into the system in order to improve the state of pedestrian and traffic safety on a community level, improving traffic safety experiences for everyone, not just our immediate users.
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Still a bit curious? Then feel free to take a look at some of the other projects I have done over the past few years.
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