On Alchohol Consumption and Automotive Design

A recent pattern of innovation I've been recognizing is related to businesses' attempts to prevent undesirable use scenarios of their products/services, caused by users under the influence of alcohol. Among several examples are new cellphones developed by LG, Samsung and Nokia, that aim to prevent drunk phone calls. Another recent example comes from the online giant Google, whose e-mailing service Googlemail now has a feature called Mail Goggles to "prevent many of you out there from sending messages you wish you hadn't".

These new product and service features are well-celebrated by online communities and have discovered a channel of innovation that could potentially spread amongst other businesses. I myself have to admit that I find these new features very interesting, but unfortunately, at the same time, trivial.

While drunk-phoning and e-mailing could potentially cause regrettable consequences, there is another area of products/services where preventing these consequences could be even more crucial. If you wonder what that area is, I guess, the phrase "drunk-driving" would be enough to strike a chord--in my opinion, the sociography that has evolved around automobiles desperately awaits a similar kind of innovation to be translated into a mainstream practice.

Donald A. Norman coins the term "forcing functions" to indicate certain functions that are inscribed in a product, which prevent undesirable shifts of direction in the use-scenario of that product ["The Design of Everyday Things." (Basic Books, New York, 1988). Pages 132-40.] A simple example he uses is on the types of cars whose door can only be locked by using the car-key, as opposed to a car that locks itself automatically, which would result in forgetful drivers getting locked out.

One cannot help but wonder why similar kinds of features are not studied and developed by the car industry. Hopefully design has a couple more tricks--than just styling--up its sleeve. Could adding a couple of relevant "forcing functions" result in the reduction of accidents caused by drunk-driving?

But, then again, as a civilization, we would be running other risks; like losing the profits generated by the hospitalization of accident victims, car repairs and purchase of new cars. Right?

`Smash up your car, the insurance will do the rest!' Indeed, the car is without doubt one of the main foci of daily and long-term waste, both private and collective. Not only is it so by its systematically reduced use-value, its systematically increased prestige and fashion coefficient, and the outrageous sums invested in it, but -- without doubt much more deeply than this -- by the spectacular collective sacrifice of sheet-metal, machinery and human lives in the Accident. The Accident: that gigantic `happening', the finest offered by consumer society, through which society affords itself in the ritual destruction of materials and life the proof of its excessive affluence (a proof a contrario, but one that is much more effective in the depths of the imagination than the direct proof by accumulation). [Jean Baudrillard. "The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures." (Sage, London, England, 1998). Page 48.]