Circular Car Concept
Services
UX Design
Product Design
Company
Volkswagen Group of America
Year
2025
Team
Victoria Feng — Lead UX Designer
Albert Kim — Project Manager
Adrian Haar — Project Manager
Mareike Konz — Developer
Victor-Alexander Mahn — Developer
The Volkswagen Group of America Innovation Center of California is an innovation hub for the many car brands within the group and investigates and prototypes future concepts for transfer to brands.
An increased shift in focus towards vehicle sustainability challenged the team to explore concepts that would extend the usage of a vehicle past its current lifetime limiters — notably the software and the existing screens. In this project we explored the circularity of the vehicle, how the interior space and experience could transform with all the uses over the vehicle’s lifetime, from the transforming the experience by bringing your own devices to the textiles and interior design of the cabin.
On this project I was able to serve as UX design lead and worked with a team of developers and interior designers to create a digital and physical demo that was presented at the annual Volkswagen Group Future Mobility Days conference held in August in Wolfsburg, Germany.
The Problem
Defining the Vehicle Life Cycle
With the ever changing cycle of in vehicle technologies, we were presented with the challenge of creating a circular car concept. A vehicle experience that isn’t defined by vehicle software and hardware, but by the information the driver is able to bring in via their own devices.
In understanding our user, we were also able to define what the vehicle life cycle looked like and who and how they were using the car over this period of time. Through team research and development, a 15 year lifecycle broken into three 5 year segments were defined as well as a persona for each sector.
Understanding the Use Cases
In the first year of this project, a demo was created that showed a seamless experience where our concept vehicle had no existing screens other than a FID behind the steering wheel. Our vehicle design team created the concept, look, and textile feel of the magnetic, NFC activated device bar that allowed users to mount devices along the dash in a flexible manner.
The challenge presented in the second year was to make this a more near term technology project, exploring how this concept expands into a vehicle space with an existing infotainment screen as well as an integrated experience with the rear row passengers, a more family focused concept.
The Process
Bring Your Own Device
In the previous year, this project explored a driver centric viewpoint in understanding how the interactions would look like if presented with a bare vehicle interface, completely dependent on devices and removing vehicle hardware and software as a limiter to vehicle lifetime.
To create this experience, there were 3 main modes that each screen could exist in — media, navigation and circularity. The steering wheel buttons served as the primary controls to switch devices between screens.
Using a seating buck, we were able to test and expand the interactions to become more touch friendly and to restructure the mode based design to include media, navigation, entertainment, and a quick controls panel to further extend the driver's ability to personalize their experience.
Redefining the Visual Language
In addition to using the original experience as a jumping point, part of our work package was to redefine the look and feel of the project. This included creating a new design system and introducing a dashboard look to the main large screen connected to the system — this doubled as a way to allow our concept to tie into a more near term vision as most vehicles currently have and will be sold with a center screen.
The Solution
Personalized Device Centric Experience
Starting with a barebones vehicle experience, the driver experiences a transformation of the space when the device is connected. Not only is the driver able to access their contacts, media, and navigation apps of choice, but also the vehicle interior changes to match personalized colors, text size, and pre set shortcuts
Segmenting the experience into navigation, media, entertainment, and quick controls allowed for devices to act both as an extension or an addition to the screens already present.
Rear Passenger Experience
Challenged with extending the device experience to the rear seat and understanding how the vehicle can be a more interactive experience with all the passengers, we created an experience that can allow entertainment and media to be played separately or as a whole vehicle experience for families.
We also worked with our interior design team to create future concepts for partnerships with storytelling experiences by creating token activated story experiences for rear seat passengers.
Linking Animations
As we explored the relationship between the devices and the vehicle, another important interaction to consider and design was the relationship between devices. When bringing in additional devices to they system, it was important to give the device a sense of place as well as indication it had entered the ecosystem.
When designing this interaction, we considered both devices in the same parallel (driver and front passenger) as well as the rear seat passenger and came up with a delightful connection animation that indicates to the main display where the device is connected from (left/right side or rear) and transitions into the connected device application.
