I found this beautiful example of Design while watching the interesting keynote that Robert Fabricant gave at the IxDA Interaction 09, in Vancouver.
Robert “kicked up a bit of a controversy” by declaring a new approach about how to understand Interaction Design thesedays:
“This approach considers all of the contexts surrounding use and then tries to build a unified interaction model to support user needs over time, across these contexts. It focuses not just on expressed needs but on those that are unexpressed: the emotions, motivations, and desires that shape user engagement over time.”
To me, the deepest conclusion about Robert´s keynote is how Design can be able to change human behaviour. And the dashboard prototype showed above resumes everything:
The speed needle of this dashboard has two “sides”, the closest to the center shows the advisable speed for a concrete gear, while the edge of this needle shows real speed. By curving this needle drivers visualize the relationship between real and advisable speed, getting a concrete idea about the fuel consumption and motivating them to adapt their speed. This brilliant example gives this information in one single needle!
I´ve been surfing the web trying to find out who did this job, the only thing I know is that comes from a Korean company. But that´s all… If somebody knows more about this I´ll be glad to hear it.