December 16, 2019 • 45 mins
Live from inside a Mazda CX-30 at the Los Angeles Auto Show, Jonathan talks about the concept of human centric design and why it's not as straightforward as you might imagine.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production of I Heart Radios
How Stuff Works. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff.
I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland, and I'm an executive producer
with I Heart Radio and I love all things tech
and today's episode is a special one. So for one thing,
(00:24):
you're going to get to hear that intro all over
again in just a second, because this episode is brought
to you by Mazda. The company invited me to come
out to the Los Angeles Auto Show in November two
thousand nineteen to check out their cars and specifically to
get some hands on time with the c X thirty suv,
and that included the chance to record an episode on
(00:47):
the show floor inside a c X thirty. And I
was talking about the concept of human centric design, specifically
within the context of designing vehicles and even more specifically
the c X there. So what you're about to hear
is the audio from that. It was recorded on Friday,
November twenty second, two thousand nineteen, from the Mazda booth
(01:08):
at the l A Auto Show. You will also hear
some audio from a separate conversation with Dave Coleman, who's
an engineer at Mazda. He's with their research and development division,
and he talks in more detail about the kinds of
decisions that go into creating a specific experience, which is
kind of at the heart of the philosophy of human
(01:28):
centric design. There are a couple of other notes I
want to mention before we jump into this. First is
that this episode was recorded live in the Los Angeles
Convention Center, and so it's not going to sound like
the studio recordings. You'll likely hear a lot of extraneous sounds.
I even comment on it at one point. Another is
(01:50):
that you may hear some other familiar voices when we
get to Dave's discussions because Lauren voege Obama Brain Stuff,
and and savor Uh and Jack O'Brien and Miles of
the Daily Zeitgeist we're also there at the show, so
they are occasionally chatting as well. You might hear their voices,
and I will be popping in from the studio as
(02:10):
in from where I'm recording right now a few times
to help kind of bridge a few gaps between Dave's
discussions and the episode I recorded. So with all that
business out of the way, let's hear that intro all
over again, So take it away past Jonathan. Hey there,
and welcome to text stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland.
(02:32):
I'm an executive producer with my Heart Radio and I
love all things tech and ladies and gentlemen. I am
having quite the experience right now. I know a lot
of you listeners out there. You like to listen to
me while you're in your car. Well, guess what. I'm
recording this from inside a Mazda c X thirty at
the l A Auto Show. Yeah. For once, I'm talking
(02:54):
to you in a car. Let's just let's just hang
out together for a while, shall we. So today I
have the incredible opportunity to talk about the philosophy behind
human centric design. This is something I've always been fascinated by.
It's something that applies to all elements of design, no
(03:17):
matter what you are trying to create. But I'm specifically
going to talk about it in the context of the
Masda c X thirty because I happen to be sitting
in the front seat of one, and it is also comfortable.
This is actually tri I don't know where you are
right now, but this seat is really good. So if
you can talk to Mazda and find out how to
get the seat in the studio to be just like
(03:39):
this one. That's great, and if you don't, you're fired. Okay,
So I want to talk about the general principles behind
design in the first place, and then we'll narrow it down.
You guys know how my show goes. So let's say
you're an engineer and you have defined what goal you're
going for. You've identified a specific goal that you want
(04:04):
to achieve. And beyond defining the goal, that's obviously one
of the first big parts of this process. You need
to figure out what are your objectives and what are
your challenges, what are the things standing in your way
of achieving your goal, and you start to make decisions
to try and get to your goal as best you can.
(04:25):
Those decisions can sometimes end up having things that conflict
with each other. You have to find a way to
resolve those conflicts and to actually achieve the goal you
have defined for yourself. This is not necessarily an easy
thing to do. It's one of the biggest challenges of engineering.
It's why a lot of the engineers I've talked to
relish their job. They love the process of sitting down
(04:50):
and going from concept to reality and all the processes
that go along with that. Now, some of that can
end up being a lot of trial and error. A
lot of it can end up being having to to
retrace your steps, and if we're all being honest, not
all of it is super fun. Sometimes you try out
an idea that you were convinced was going to be
(05:11):
perfect and then you realize that, oh, you know what,
it's good, but it just broke everything else. So it's
a very tough process to actually go through. But once
you have figured out all the different challenges, you defined
your objectives, you start to ideate your solutions. You start
to think, this is the way I think is the
best for me to achieve the goal, and then how
(05:33):
do I go about actually making that reality. You go
through that process, which can be laborious, and then you
test it and you find out how well you did,
and maybe it turns out that the solution you have
is incredible on paper, but in reality it turns out
to fall short. That's something that actually does happen quite
(05:53):
a bit in all realms of technology, and I've seen
this a lot in my uh storied career as a
technology journalist. You see attempts to try and achieve something
really revolutionary, let's say, and in the process you might
end up losing sight of what your initial goal was
(06:14):
in the first place, which was to deliver something to
an end user, whoever that may be, that is meaningful
and and produces a specific result. Maybe that the thing
you've created works really well again on paper, but that
it doesn't feel like it works really well when you
get it in the hands of the end user. That
(06:36):
is what human centric design tries to address. It tries
to keep in mind that at the end of the day,
you are making something to create a human experience, and
that every decision you make ultimately needs to be geared
toward that. Also, I'm probably gonna be dropping a lot
of car puns unintentionally. It's just because I'm in this environment.
(07:00):
So we've talked about that little element of challenge, this
idea of trying to, you know, I, identify what your
goal is and to work your way to it. The
next thing you have to think about is how your
goal may end up working with, integrating with other goals
that other people have, or it may conflict with those Because,
(07:23):
as I'm sure you're all aware, something like a car,
a vehicle. Uh, it's actually a collection of many different systems. Now,
each system needs to contribute toward that end goal, that
human centric goal where you're creating this feeling that you
want your end user to have. But they don't necessarily
(07:45):
all work in harmony together natively. You can't expect that
if you're working, let's say, on a drive train system
and someone else is working on a different system, that
those two are just going to magically work together and
produce the perfect experience when it all comes out at
the end. You actually have to do a lot of collaboration,
(08:06):
and sometimes that means that you're having lots of complicated
conversations weighing your different goals, weighing your different priorities, and
deciding which ones are going to take priority in one
case versus another. You might be able to make some concessions.
You might be able to kind of find a middle ground.
You might be able to find use cases where one
(08:27):
philosophy wins out over another. For example, we had a
chance to talk with a great engineer, Dave. He talked
about how with the Masta c X thirty, there was
this balance between performance and making sure that the ride
was nice and quiet. And the problem is that as
you start to weigh one of those, the other one
(08:50):
begins begins to uh end up having needing more attention.
So you have to figure out, well, where's the balance here.
We want to make sure that we have all the
elements here so that we create the feeling that we
really want our end users to have. And that is
not something again that is natively obvious. It means that
you have to have a lot of conversations, a lot
(09:13):
of collaboration. Uh. And in the case of Mazda, as
we learned while we were here at the auto show,
that ends up being a lot easier because the teams
are more closely located to one another. They aren't spread
across the globe where you might have one team working
completely independently of the others. And then when you bring
(09:35):
all the systems together, only then do you realize that
you start seeing these conflicts. Hey, it's Jonathan from the
booth again. But I just wanted to tell you that
we're going to take a very quick break and come
right back to the episode, So don't go anywhere, all right, guys,
(09:56):
it's Jonathan from the studio again. Now I figured This
is a great spot to insert some audio that we
captured with Engineered Dave Coleman that really helps illustrate what
I was talking about earlier on. In this episode, we're
going to start with Dave giving us the sort of
mission statement his team had in mind and how they
went about trying to achieve it. So I guess at
(10:18):
a high level, what we're trying to do with this
car is gets something that is we'll let you do
kind of just whatever it you want to do, wherever
you want to go whatever. It's not really specifically tune
to one particular kind of driving. UM. It's supposed to
be really sort of natural and easy and capable enough
to to do whatever hurt you're interested in. UM. So
(10:39):
we wanted to make it so it's it's comfortable and
quiet every day, it's efficient, it's fun to drive. When
you go out on twisty road and you want to
go to some you know, rock climbing place or hiking
trail and mountain bike and that's way up some dirt
road that's really tricky. It's got to off road capability
to get you there too, and it's balancing all the
(11:00):
kind of the right way is a big trick. Um.
We're we've been working on some new sort of off
road capabilities. It's mostly electronic trickery. UM, and sort of
had to figure out where we draw the line on
making our cars taple on offer. We've always been a
completely on road company. Uh, and so we've we've sort
of drawn the line that, uh, well, there's a lot
(11:21):
of stuff you can do to make cars super capable
offer road that ruins how it drives the rest of
the time. So we've drawn the line that we won't
do anything to compromise how it drives on the road,
but we still want all the capabilities to get places. Um.
And this is the first car that we've got that's
got an offer button that changes a bunch of the settings. UM.
(11:41):
So some of the some of the kind of trick
stuff that we're doing under the skin. UM. We've got
our new all the drive system and the G Vectorian
control system, which is a very weird, subtle thing for
making the car behave in a way that feels more
natural to people. UM. So we've I'll start with the
(12:03):
G factor in control. So, UM, we found that as
you're driving, the very first moment you make the steering
input The cars are a little bit Every car is
a little bit inconsistent about how it makes that first
bit of the turn. And the reason is because you're
sitting on these theneumatic tires. It's just a balloon, right Uh.
And in its straight ahead state, both sidewalls are sort
(12:25):
of unloaded, and when you corner, one of sidewall goes
slack and one starts pulling, and that's what's pulling the
car in the corners. So there's this transition period as
the car starts to transition into that corner, and that's
where things are kind of the most nervous for the
driver's subconscious as they kind of DESI will when do
I turn and how much do I turn? And once
you get into the corner and everything feels naturally, you
(12:47):
figure out what you're doing. But people aren't really consciously nervous.
But if you watch someone's steering inputs as they turn
into a corner, a lot of times they turn in
and back off and adjust a couple of times because
they get it figured out. Uh. And so designed the
system to try to attack that subtle problem that people
didn't know they were doing. Um. And what we do
(13:08):
is we figured out that we can we can wait,
but a little bit more weight on the front tires
just as you turn. Uh. And this is a trick
that we learned from race driving. Um I used to
race rally cars racing off road in the gravel, and
the rally drivers always using the left foot on the brakes.
You turn the wheel and put a little bit of
extra weight on the front tires and it makes them
(13:28):
grab into the into the grab or turn the car. UM.
A lot of broad racing guys will do this to
one foot on the gas, one foot on the brake,
unlike on the street where you're left foots on the
clutch or just resting. But you've got one on each
of you can you can constantly adjust the weight balance
of the car. So we started sort of from that
idea and tuned it and tuned it and tuned it,
trying to make it so it's so subtle. You don't
(13:50):
feel the car slowing down to shift weight under the front,
but you do feel the response in the way the
car turns. Um And now we've got a tune. So
there's steering system. As you turn the wheel, the electric
power steering knows exactly what the put you're giving it,
so it looks at the steering speed and that communicates
with the engine computer and it tells it to reduce
(14:11):
power just a hair and it dips a little bit
of extra weight onto the front tires and tightens up
the tires so they respond more directly. Um, we don't
have any on off switch for that. They'll never feel it.
It's it's soon so well that it just kind of
just feels normal all the time. Right. We've built a
couple of cars with on off switches for that, and
it's it's really funny because it's it's it's not super obvious,
(14:35):
but it's once you kind of pick out what it's doing,
it actually makes a difference even just driving completely straight ahead,
because you don't realize is when you're driving straight you're
making constantly making little corrections, right, and if each one
of those has a little delay, and then to catch up,
you're you're constantly overshooting and coming back. And as soon
as we turn the system on, people just just settle
up because they make repression and would stick and they
(14:57):
wouldn't have to make the next one of the next
one and the next one. Um. So that's in all
of our cars now. Um that that's called g Vactric control.
We just came out with the electric control plus which
helps when you start straighten the wheel back out, um,
and the the car will sometimes be a little bit
(15:17):
slow to kind of come backing up the pull wheel
straight and so to avoid that, we actually will drag
the outside break just a hair and it suddenly just
kind of kind of helps it straight back out. You
don't again, you don't feel a break when you can
switch it on and off. What you feel is it
feels soally normal. And then if if you were to
switch the system off, you feel like steerings kind of
going yeah, gun, yeah, gun's a good but yeah, it's
(15:37):
just kind of overdamped and you kind of have to
pull it back. Um. So we're really kind of down
in the weeds of these little subtle details to get
the car to feel natural and to feel totally almost
so you don't notice all the work we did, right.
Is there like a general like description drivers have that
like now that this stuff has been corrected, or do
(15:58):
they just like say it's smoother, like you know, we've
always had a focus on this kind of area. Um,
so we've always sort of tuned our cars to feel
just feel right and just feel until it used to
be our slogan decades ago. It just feels right right.
That's It's we've kind of always been trying to do
the same thing. Um. So I don't think adding GBC
(16:20):
wasn't like a dramatic change. Was another tool in our
toolbox of all these things that we're trying to do.
If we took this system and put it on the
car built by people who didn't care about this stuff,
it wouldn't be enough to pick it right, but it's
enough to sort of add in our direction of making
the car, you know, more natural. Um. Sort of our
our ind goal is to make driving a car so
(16:43):
naturally you don't think about it. You're just you just drive,
just do exactly what you wanted to do. Um. The
whole wheel drive system in this car we mechanically is
the same as almost everybody's. You drive the front wheels,
there's a clutch where you can connect the rear wheels
sometimes when you need it and not when you don't.
And all the magic is in the software to figure
(17:03):
out when you need it when you don't exactly how much, right,
because if you're always driving the rear wheels, it uses
a lot of extra fuel and it actually UM diffront
reules have to go to the same speed when they're
locked together, and so the car doesn't want to turn,
and so you're always balancing its ability to turn with
its ability to drive the rear wheels. UM. We've come
up with a system where we're running software algorithm that's
(17:26):
basically kind of like a video game algorithm that's looking
at the vehicle speed and cornering G acceleration G hand
calculating exactly how much loaders on each tire based on
the vehicle dynamics model of how this car behaves. And
so it's constantly calculating what load is on each tire
and then distributing torque where it's needed to take advantage
of that UM, which means that this actually can expand
(17:50):
the performance envelope even on dry paving, not just in
you know, wet or slippery conditions. UM. And that lets
us use the OL wild drives to an advantage without
using it in places but we don't need it waste
fuel right UM. And then there's a couple of places
where those two ideas the g vactor control trying to
(18:12):
get the car turning in precisely, and what the oil
drive is doing where they don't get along where we're
If we're driving the rear wheels at a certain time,
it will make the car resists turning in because they're
trying to go the same speed. And so we have
to integrate those two systems so that the g vactor
control gets the authority right at the moment that it
needs the car to turn. And then when you're steady state,
it goes back and sends more to the rear, and
(18:34):
then it straights back out and can even drag a
little bit more to the rear to help. So it
is a really complicated interplayoffs software to get all these
systems and the cars to talk to each other. Uh.
And it's it has to to get it to work
at the speed that our mind is processing things so
that it feels so that we were really fast in
(18:55):
what we can recognize, UM. So to to make it
so we don't feel that it's doing something, but it
just feels seamless, and it feels like as one unit.
We had to redo a bunch of the computer hardware
in the car to communicate faster, to get the signals
from the steering into the into the thing that makes
the decisions, and then into the into the e c
U two from the to change the engine, now putta
(19:18):
to change the all world drive. Um, if I remember right,
I think we've got fifty milliseconds from steering input before
something has to happen at the other end or else
people will notice. All right, Jonathan from the booth again,
we're going to rejoin Dave a little further into that
conversation he had with us. You know, we talked about
a lot of stuff in that conversation, not all of
it pertains kind of to this human centric design concept,
(19:41):
but he gave us a little more insight into the
challenges behind making the interior of a vehicle quiet without
making it too quiet. Again, this gets to that concept
of you want to make an experience for the end user,
but you have to make sure you're giving the right experience.
It's not just an experience, but the correct one. So
(20:01):
we learned there's a very delicate balance to all of that.
Here's Dave to explain a little further. Hopefully the first
thing I'll notice is that it's quiet. You know, that
used to be a weak point of ours. Because well, again,
steering handling and n VH guys are fighting each farther,
and we always wanted our cars to handle really well
and sort of trying to elevate ourselves to the point
(20:21):
where we can have the steering handling and have the
car drive right and still be quite uncomfortable. I'm recognizing
how important that is. UM. We've sort of expanded our
our performance envelope and a lot of looking at sort
of how people hear things, what frequency ranges matter to them,
and what how it actually affects people. Um. And one
of the things we've started figure out is that we're
(20:43):
super sensitive to direction of sound, which means that if
you hear, if the sound does get into the car
and then uh, you hear reflect off the other window,
you'll pick up that reflection, maybe not consciously, but it
bothers you more than that same amount of noise just
coming one high. So we put more damping into the
(21:03):
car so that found from do get in damp out quickly.
It should be good for recording, right right. UM. And
we've also worked really a lot on isolation from outside noises,
so you don't hear the car next to you so much,
and that We're trying to strack a balance because if
you isolate too much, it's you don't practical reason became
(21:24):
the Siren's But also at a more subtle level, you
don't feel connected to what you're doing well, and you
you feel like you're not really controlling the car. You're
driving a video game, like you don't feel We want
to hear the road and feel the road just enough
to feel connected and not enough to be annoyed. And
that's the same with outside noises, like you want to
(21:45):
know that car is there, but you don't want to
know exactly what's wrong with his brakes. Jonathan, run the
boot one more time. Another thing that Dave said that
I wanted to share was about how the team worked
on the sound system for the Maths to See X
thirty and they did to put the sub whiffers in
a very special section of the vehicle and move it
(22:06):
away from the traditional place, which is within the doors.
And in order to do that, they had to communicate
and collaborate with the safety team to make sure that
this design element they wanted to include would be factored
into the structure of the vehicle from the very beginning.
Here's what Dave had to say. One of the kind
of trick ways that we improve the noise, the outside
(22:28):
noise isolation in this car and improved the audio quality
in the car was taking the big speakers out of
the doors. Everyone has their their subs in the door, right,
because that's whether you have enough room for Um, that's
a really inefficient place for a driver. Uh, in terms
of the space of the car. It's it's driving the
(22:49):
sounding that volume in the long spot. Um. And it
also is a noise path from the outside, right. So um,
we moved them up into the under the dash in
sort of in the corner of the room. Because anytime
you corner a load of speaker, the sound quality is
a lot better, right. Um. So it's a much more
efficient way to get sound in the car. So if
we don't have to put as much power in to
(23:11):
get a better sound quality at the people's ears. Um.
But also let's to steal off those doors. Um. This
is something I think everybody understood should be done. It's
incredibly hard to do because the corners of the of
the interior are actually a really critical crash structure and
there's a lot of there's a lot of other departments
(23:33):
buying for for real estate there right, Because the if
you crash into something, the load from the bumper goes
into the frame rails, which go right back into that
corner of the car, and that's where the load has
to stop crumpling things. We want everything in front of
the windshield to crumple and everything inside not too. And
so that's a really strong structural corner. So normally you
develop a car, you develt a crash structure first and
(23:55):
then everybody gets to work on after those. And we
had to get this concept of trying to move the
speakers up into the corners before we started the platform development,
to say, hey, crash guys, you have a space for
the speaker while you're doing that, and build that concept
in all right, and and so it was a really
sort of big accomplishment for us to pull off logistically.
(24:17):
Dave was a lot of fun to talk to, and
he helped us understand how these decisions to craft a
specific experience manifest in actual real world decisions and engineering choices. Now,
these are things I typically take for granted. Whenever I
use a product, I generally only think, you know, something like, wow,
this thing is really easy to use or wow, this
(24:39):
is a lot of fun, or sometimes on the flip side,
because not everything is positive. Sometimes I think, who the
heck thought this was a good design choice? Is so
inconvenient it's hard to get to. If you ever had
a user interface where you've had to navigate, you know,
five steps beyond what you thought would be necessary, you
know what I'm talking about. It's it ends up being
(25:00):
so frustrating that it actually creates a disincentive for you
to use the technology. But I rarely give it much
more consideration than that sort of surface level. But talking
with engineers really reveals how much thought has to go
into this, and it also explains that sometimes it goes
wrong because you have multiple groups all trying to get
(25:23):
their various pieces of the puzzle into place, and sometimes
that means that their peace and someone else's piece, while
they were meant to fit together, don't. They might overlap,
they might conflict, they might be a gap between them.
Those sort of things can happen when things don't go well.
Now we're going to take another quick break, but when
(25:43):
we come back, will rejoin me in the Mazda c
X thirty. All right, So now we're gonna pick back
up with me at the auto show, So you're gonna
hear the audio audio quality change again, and I'll be
talking about the importance of collaboration and communication, and away
(26:06):
we go. That ends up saving a lot of time
in the design process there. I've seen a lot of
different products come out where it was only in the
testing phase that they realized that there were these sort
of issues, and then it just meant having to go
back through a redesign process, and typically it tends to
be very similar to the first design process, which means
you still have that problem of these isolated silos, these
(26:29):
isolated departments that are each working towards their own goal
and not collaborating closely enough to get the end result
they want. So that's a huge challenge in design in general.
So you get to the point where you've built your solution,
you've tested your solution, Uh, your systems are not in isolation,
(26:51):
You've figured that part out, You've got your systems all
working together, and then you see how well it works
on paper, and then you throw people into it and
eyes you know technology. I've I've often told this to
people when I talk about my role at the podcast Realm.
You know, I've got a lot of podcast friends, a
(27:11):
lot of coworkers who do great work in all sorts
of fields. But they're talking about stuff like, you know,
society and culture and and and money and stuff. What
don't make sense, y'all. Technology, it makes sense. It either
works or it doesn't. I have the easiest job, don't
tell anyone. But when you throw people into things, it
(27:34):
gets messy because people they have expectations, they have desires,
they have motivations, they have things that technology on its
own does not have. As long as sky net has
not yet gone you know completely, you know, self aware.
I'm assuming that we're okay at the moment, but yeah,
(27:56):
people make things complicated. When people are involved, you then
have to really evaluate what your work actually means in
the real world. I want to give you, guys an
example that's unrelated to vehicles for a moment to kind
of explain what I'm thinking about here. I once intended
to talk with some roboticists who were talking about the
(28:18):
challenges they faced when they were trying to design a
robot that would that would interact with humans within a
human space, and that is a difficult thing to really engineer.
To create a robot that can seamlessly interact with humans.
So they sat down and they identified their various goals
(28:40):
and objectives. They sat down and said, all right, these
are the things that are important to us. We need
to make sure that our robot does these things. And
they were parameters like this is how close a robot
can get to another human being before it has to
stop because otherwise it's going to be crowding someone. Or
this is how close a robot can get to a
stationary object. This is how fast the robots should move
(29:02):
through the environment. This is how the robot should respond
if someone were to address it. So a whole list
of rules that they had to figure out and then design,
and this took months and months and months of testing.
There was a point where a robot was staring at
a door for two hours trying to figure out how
to open it. That's the sort of stuff we're talking about.
(29:25):
They solve all these problems and then they put the
robot into an actual human environment, and that's when everything
went pear shaped, I guess we could say, because they
realized that the human beings in that particular environment had
an expectation of how the robot was supposed to behave.
It was a robot, but the robot wasn't behaving the
(29:45):
way they thought a robot should behave. The robot was
behaving the way the engineers had thought the robots should
behave based on the way humans behave within the same
sort of social space. Now that meant that the people
who were actually encountering the robot, we're uncomfortable around the robot.
It felt weird. It was the sort of Uncanny Valley,
(30:06):
except instead of appearance, it was in behavior. So uncanny valley,
for those who are not familiar, is this gap when
you start to approach something that appears to be alive
but still has certain elements that indicate it is not
truly alive. We usually use it to describe things like
c G I characters, where a c G I character
(30:27):
looks almost but not quite real. The same thing is
true with behaviors. So the roboticists discovered that these robots
were not performing the way they needed to, that people
were not responding to them the way that they had
anticipated because it wasn't robotic enough. They actually had to
go back to the drawing board and go through and
(30:49):
start rethinking their whole process of creating robots that could
interact in social spaces and make them more robotic. That
was a fail. You're of an approach of a human
centric design in the sense that the people creating the
robots had not anticipated that human reaction, and it shows
(31:10):
that when you throw humans into an equation, things get
a little more complicated. It's not as straightforward as saying
this particular piece of technology needs to do task in
why amount of time and it has to have a
certain level of reliability. It means more than that. It
(31:31):
means defining things like a feeling, intention, defining how a
person should experience the technology. And this goes well beyond technology. Obviously,
it goes to everything that we ever designed. But really
in tech, it's something that you either get or you don't,
and if you get it when you're designing, you can
(31:53):
create something that actually has a legit special feeling when
you experience it. It's a very tough challenge because obviously,
the other big issue you have is that people are different.
You know, we have general things that kind of unite us,
but we're all individuals. We all have our own preferences,
(32:14):
our own things that that maybe annoy us, uh and
our own expectations, so it also means having to identify
which ones are the most important to whatever end result
you're looking for. So one of the things that really
we heard a lot when we were here over in
the auto show over at Mazda's this this concept of
(32:37):
feel alive, that you want to feel alive when you're
actually using the vehicle, and vehicles are such an important
central piece of technology in our lives. That is not
a small task, and it's not lips service. It's not
something that is just a tagline. It's a guiding philosophy.
(32:58):
That's the philosophy that guides the decisions that the engineers
are making in order to make a vehicle that is
fun to drive, that it's safe, that's efficient, that it
has all the things you expect a vehicle to have,
but that when you are behind the wheel and you're
actually driving it, you have the sensation of feeling alive.
That's sort of exhilarating feeling, and that it's something that
(33:22):
goes beyond just your experience behind the wheel. It's something
that is actually integrated into your experience of moving through
an environment. So when you start thinking about that, you're
thinking not just trying to define everything that's on a
dashboard or just an easy reach of the driver. You're
thinking about an experience that goes well beyond that, as
(33:43):
the driver's maneuvering through different environments. That ends up being
a very important concept to guide all of your design philosophies.
And I was really impressed with the passion that I
encountered when I talked with people from Mazda. All shared
that same sort of uh, deep desire to create that
(34:06):
kind of experience. And this is not something that is
easy to engineer. It's not something you typically hear from engineers. Uh.
This also kind of brings us to a dichotomy I
tend to encounter in the field of technology. Broadly speaking,
there are two major camps I tend to encounter when
(34:27):
I'm looking at different types of gadgets and vehicles and
things like that. One is that I see a camp
that really emphasizes esthetic over everything else, so that the
look of it is supposed to be extremely evocative and
that it makes you want to use it in some way,
(34:48):
but that is the guiding principle behind the design. The
other I've seen is a more I think of it
as the engineering approach in the sense that it needs
to work, it needs to be able to do the
things that it was supposed to do. Uh, And that
becomes primary and aesthetic is is secondary, or maybe tertiary,
or maybe for some companies, not really a thing that
(35:11):
anyone thinks about. Uh. I'm sure many of you have
owned gadgets out there that fall into that category where
you think this thing is ugly as sin. It does
what it's supposed to do, but I don't like to
look at it. The real goal, I think, is trying
to bridge the gap between those two different philosophies, bringing
together the aesthetic and the desire to get the engineering
(35:34):
just right. Uh. I think a lot about my experience
with different things like mobile devices. That's the one that
I always think about about how I've had experiences with
ones where it looks really nice, it looks really sexy,
looks like it would go fast just standing still, and
others that it doesn't look so good, but you can
(35:55):
definitely see how everything works. Uh. And maybe you have
to learn the peculiarities of that particular system in order
for you to have a deeper appreciation, but you once
you do, it works just fine. Marrying those two is
really challenging, but it's also a very important part of
this human centric focus. Knowing that people do value both
(36:18):
the aesthetic and the function of a device, and again
for something as important as a vehicle, it becomes even
more imperative that you get that just right. So to
achieve this, it's all the all these different processes, all
these different philosophies I've talked about, have to come together.
We heard about how at Mazda they are still very
(36:43):
focused on very traditional ways of modeling, say the exterior
of a car, doing it through clay first and sculpting
it so that you can get exactly the right feel.
You know, you can very carefully shave away a tiny
slow ver of clay in order to get just the
right shape or just the right curve, and doing all
(37:05):
of that to meticulous detail until you do a full
scan of it and three D and then maybe then
at that point you can go to additive manufacturing, like
a three D printing sort of approach and create your
first three D printed version of the thing that you
have sculpted out of clay. They talked about how even
(37:25):
getting to a point where you could build the full
sized version of uh like a door, for example, that
if it wasn't just right, their engineers would take hand
uh handcrafted approaches to making sure they got exactly the
(37:47):
curve that they wanted in order to achieve the result
that they were going for. And that kind of level
of attention to detail is something that I find really inspiring.
It's also kind of intimidating you think about the scale
that that requires, and uh, that's not something that's easily
tackled either. So it's I feel like this is one
(38:10):
of those cases where you hear about the philosophy and
then you hear the stories behind it, and you really
feel that that you're talking to a company that's that's
walking the walk. They're not just talking the talk, they
really follow through with that, uh, and that to me
is really exciting. So I hope that I'm able to
(38:30):
kind of illustrate to you this incredible journey the the
from the point where you actually identify what it is
you want to do to the point of seeing it
come together and all the different challenges that face you
along the way. Uh. There are so many different examples
of that with any kind of technology, including vehicles, where
(38:53):
you can look at this and say, like if if
one of these systems didn't work just right, then it
would affect everything else. It becomes a cascading effect, and
no matter how good the design is on other elements
of the vehicle, you would still fall short of your goal.
And it really does drive home how enormous a challenge
this is. So I think they're playing me off. No,
(39:17):
I think that this has been an incredible experience for me.
This is an awesome studio. I can't wait to have
it installed in Atlanta. Uh everyone's laughing. Okay, well it
would still be great. I think uh Tari would have
fewer instances of me having you know, Diva fits in
(39:39):
the studio if I were recording in something like this
every single episode. Uh. Plus, I mean, there's it's spacious.
I could have so many guests in a single episode
and we could all have our own, our own nice
comfortable seats. I'm just really, it's a practical thing. I'm saying,
Like my studio back in Atlanta, we can fit maybe
three people in there before we get it's crowded. This time,
(40:01):
I can cram a lot of folks in here, including
sound engineers. So Tary it benefits you too, is what
I'm saying, but I want to think masdo for having
me come out here and to experience this and to
get a firsthand look at the culmination of this idea.
I've heard a lot about this philosophy. I've talked to
(40:22):
people who have been sort of really passionate about the
concept behind human centric design, but it's rare that I
actually get an experience, a truly immersive experience, because I
am actually in it where I see the fruition of that.
And when you get a chance to see that and
you you understand the decisions that went behind all those
(40:45):
design choices, you get a deeper appreciation for that process
and all the work that goes into just making something
actually happen. I think we all take for granted what
it makes to create a piece of technology like this.
You know, we might think of the manufacturing process, because
(41:06):
that's one that is easy to illustrate. It's you see
the factory line, But it's so much more than that.
The process takes years of work, years of engineering, years
of iterating and building upon past uh learnings, and two
continue to innovate on top of that. It is a
(41:26):
really interesting and inspiring experience to actually see this in person.
With that, I think I'm gonna wrap up because, um,
you know, I think I think i've I've covered it
pretty well. And plus I really want to have a
little more experience jumping around in the back seat of
this thing, because I've been saying in the front the
(41:47):
whole time and I haven't even experienced what the back
seats like. And I don't think anyone's gonna stop me
as long as I hold a microphone in my hand.
So I'm going to sign off, but don't tell anyone
who's actually here that I've done that. I'll just I'll
pretend like I'm still point. Oh they're broadcasting the whole
thing right now. Okay, well, alright, so on that. No, guys,
we're gonna wrap up this episode. Remember if you want
(42:10):
to reach out to me, text stuff at how stuff
works dot com, or you can pop onto Facebook or Twitter.
That's tech stuff hs W and uh, I look forward
to talking to you again really soon. And it's Jonathan
back in the studio. So I want to thank Mazda
for having me out at the auto show and getting
(42:30):
a chance to experience just a tiny sliver of the
work that they put into the c x thirty. You know,
I didn't get a chance to ride in it, but
it was really cool getting to see it up close
and actually sit in it and record an episode. It
was a fun experience. And uh and everyone there, by
the way, was incredibly kind and very helpful. So I
(42:52):
had a really good experience with everybody over there. So
thank you guys a lot. You guys are awesome. It
also reminded me that with every piece of technology I encounter,
no matter what it might be, there typically dozens or
hundreds or maybe even thousands of people who helped shape
that technology, maybe a little bit, maybe they helped define it,
but they all had their impact on that technology before
(43:15):
I ever got a chance to touch it. And that
when it all goes right, when everything is falling into
place properly, when people are able to collaborate, when they're
able to communicate, then they can produce technology in turn
creates a specific experience that reflects whatever the original intent
was of the design team. That comes to the very
(43:36):
goal of human centric design. And again, this is not
an easy thing to achieve. It is incredibly challenging. You
might define what you want people to feel like, but
then it may turn out that when people actually experience
the product, they feel something entirely different, and that you
could argue that that represents a failure on your part
(43:59):
as far as the design goes, and you have to
factor in human psychology and human behaviors that aren't something
that are so easy to quantify. As you know, how
efficient an engine is running, or how long a tire
can can be in service before you need to replace it.
Those are things that you can quantify much more easily.
(44:21):
So this human centric design philosophy is something that I
think is really fascinating, incredibly challenging, and when you get
it right, amazingly satisfying. All right, Well, that wraps up
this episode. And I know I gave a sign off
in the live section, but you know, I I feel
like if I don't do it again, I'm not really
doing my job. If you guys have suggestions for topics
(44:43):
you would like me to cover in future episodes of
tech Stuff, you can reach out via email the addresses
tech stuff at how stuffworks dot com, or you can
pop onto Facebook or Twitter the handle for both of
those Text Stuff hs W. You can also pop on
over to our website that tech Stuff Podcast dot com.
You'll find an archive of every episode that we've ever
(45:04):
recorded and published. It's all there's searchable. So if there's
a specific topic you would you know I want to
know more about, you can search and see if I've
already done an episode on it, and if not, then
use the aforementioned ways to get in touch with me
and let me know about it and I'll get right
on it. And also there's a link to our online
store where every purchasing make goes to help the show,
and we greatly appreciate it, and I will talk to
(45:27):
you again and really soon. Text Stuff is a production
of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts
from I heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to tech Stuff, a production of I Heart Radios
How Stuff Works. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff.
I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland, and I'm an executive producer
with I Heart Radio and I love all things tech
and today's episode is a special one. So for one thing,
(00:24):
you're going to get to hear that intro all over
again in just a second, because this episode is brought
to you by Mazda. The company invited me to come
out to the Los Angeles Auto Show in November two
thousand nineteen to check out their cars and specifically to
get some hands on time with the c X thirty suv,
and that included the chance to record an episode on
(00:47):
the show floor inside a c X thirty. And I
was talking about the concept of human centric design, specifically
within the context of designing vehicles and even more specifically
the c X there. So what you're about to hear
is the audio from that. It was recorded on Friday,
November twenty second, two thousand nineteen, from the Mazda booth
(01:08):
at the l A Auto Show. You will also hear
some audio from a separate conversation with Dave Coleman, who's
an engineer at Mazda. He's with their research and development division,
and he talks in more detail about the kinds of
decisions that go into creating a specific experience, which is
kind of at the heart of the philosophy of human
(01:28):
centric design. There are a couple of other notes I
want to mention before we jump into this. First is
that this episode was recorded live in the Los Angeles
Convention Center, and so it's not going to sound like
the studio recordings. You'll likely hear a lot of extraneous sounds.
I even comment on it at one point. Another is
(01:50):
that you may hear some other familiar voices when we
get to Dave's discussions because Lauren voege Obama Brain Stuff,
and and savor Uh and Jack O'Brien and Miles of
the Daily Zeitgeist we're also there at the show, so
they are occasionally chatting as well. You might hear their voices,
and I will be popping in from the studio as
(02:10):
in from where I'm recording right now a few times
to help kind of bridge a few gaps between Dave's
discussions and the episode I recorded. So with all that
business out of the way, let's hear that intro all
over again, So take it away past Jonathan. Hey there,
and welcome to text stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland.
(02:32):
I'm an executive producer with my Heart Radio and I
love all things tech and ladies and gentlemen. I am
having quite the experience right now. I know a lot
of you listeners out there. You like to listen to
me while you're in your car. Well, guess what. I'm
recording this from inside a Mazda c X thirty at
the l A Auto Show. Yeah. For once, I'm talking
(02:54):
to you in a car. Let's just let's just hang
out together for a while, shall we. So today I
have the incredible opportunity to talk about the philosophy behind
human centric design. This is something I've always been fascinated by.
It's something that applies to all elements of design, no
(03:17):
matter what you are trying to create. But I'm specifically
going to talk about it in the context of the
Masda c X thirty because I happen to be sitting
in the front seat of one, and it is also comfortable.
This is actually tri I don't know where you are
right now, but this seat is really good. So if
you can talk to Mazda and find out how to
get the seat in the studio to be just like
(03:39):
this one. That's great, and if you don't, you're fired. Okay,
So I want to talk about the general principles behind
design in the first place, and then we'll narrow it down.
You guys know how my show goes. So let's say
you're an engineer and you have defined what goal you're
going for. You've identified a specific goal that you want
(04:04):
to achieve. And beyond defining the goal, that's obviously one
of the first big parts of this process. You need
to figure out what are your objectives and what are
your challenges, what are the things standing in your way
of achieving your goal, and you start to make decisions
to try and get to your goal as best you can.
(04:25):
Those decisions can sometimes end up having things that conflict
with each other. You have to find a way to
resolve those conflicts and to actually achieve the goal you
have defined for yourself. This is not necessarily an easy
thing to do. It's one of the biggest challenges of engineering.
It's why a lot of the engineers I've talked to
relish their job. They love the process of sitting down
(04:50):
and going from concept to reality and all the processes
that go along with that. Now, some of that can
end up being a lot of trial and error. A
lot of it can end up being having to to
retrace your steps, and if we're all being honest, not
all of it is super fun. Sometimes you try out
an idea that you were convinced was going to be
(05:11):
perfect and then you realize that, oh, you know what,
it's good, but it just broke everything else. So it's
a very tough process to actually go through. But once
you have figured out all the different challenges, you defined
your objectives, you start to ideate your solutions. You start
to think, this is the way I think is the
best for me to achieve the goal, and then how
(05:33):
do I go about actually making that reality. You go
through that process, which can be laborious, and then you
test it and you find out how well you did,
and maybe it turns out that the solution you have
is incredible on paper, but in reality it turns out
to fall short. That's something that actually does happen quite
(05:53):
a bit in all realms of technology, and I've seen
this a lot in my uh storied career as a
technology journalist. You see attempts to try and achieve something
really revolutionary, let's say, and in the process you might
end up losing sight of what your initial goal was
(06:14):
in the first place, which was to deliver something to
an end user, whoever that may be, that is meaningful
and and produces a specific result. Maybe that the thing
you've created works really well again on paper, but that
it doesn't feel like it works really well when you
get it in the hands of the end user. That
(06:36):
is what human centric design tries to address. It tries
to keep in mind that at the end of the day,
you are making something to create a human experience, and
that every decision you make ultimately needs to be geared
toward that. Also, I'm probably gonna be dropping a lot
of car puns unintentionally. It's just because I'm in this environment.
(07:00):
So we've talked about that little element of challenge, this
idea of trying to, you know, I, identify what your
goal is and to work your way to it. The
next thing you have to think about is how your
goal may end up working with, integrating with other goals
that other people have, or it may conflict with those Because,
(07:23):
as I'm sure you're all aware, something like a car,
a vehicle. Uh, it's actually a collection of many different systems. Now,
each system needs to contribute toward that end goal, that
human centric goal where you're creating this feeling that you
want your end user to have. But they don't necessarily
(07:45):
all work in harmony together natively. You can't expect that
if you're working, let's say, on a drive train system
and someone else is working on a different system, that
those two are just going to magically work together and
produce the perfect experience when it all comes out at
the end. You actually have to do a lot of collaboration,
(08:06):
and sometimes that means that you're having lots of complicated
conversations weighing your different goals, weighing your different priorities, and
deciding which ones are going to take priority in one
case versus another. You might be able to make some concessions.
You might be able to kind of find a middle ground.
You might be able to find use cases where one
(08:27):
philosophy wins out over another. For example, we had a
chance to talk with a great engineer, Dave. He talked
about how with the Masta c X thirty, there was
this balance between performance and making sure that the ride
was nice and quiet. And the problem is that as
you start to weigh one of those, the other one
(08:50):
begins begins to uh end up having needing more attention.
So you have to figure out, well, where's the balance here.
We want to make sure that we have all the
elements here so that we create the feeling that we
really want our end users to have. And that is
not something again that is natively obvious. It means that
you have to have a lot of conversations, a lot
(09:13):
of collaboration. Uh. And in the case of Mazda, as
we learned while we were here at the auto show,
that ends up being a lot easier because the teams
are more closely located to one another. They aren't spread
across the globe where you might have one team working
completely independently of the others. And then when you bring
(09:35):
all the systems together, only then do you realize that
you start seeing these conflicts. Hey, it's Jonathan from the
booth again. But I just wanted to tell you that
we're going to take a very quick break and come
right back to the episode, So don't go anywhere, all right, guys,
(09:56):
it's Jonathan from the studio again. Now I figured This
is a great spot to insert some audio that we
captured with Engineered Dave Coleman that really helps illustrate what
I was talking about earlier on. In this episode, we're
going to start with Dave giving us the sort of
mission statement his team had in mind and how they
went about trying to achieve it. So I guess at
(10:18):
a high level, what we're trying to do with this
car is gets something that is we'll let you do
kind of just whatever it you want to do, wherever
you want to go whatever. It's not really specifically tune
to one particular kind of driving. UM. It's supposed to
be really sort of natural and easy and capable enough
to to do whatever hurt you're interested in. UM. So
(10:39):
we wanted to make it so it's it's comfortable and
quiet every day, it's efficient, it's fun to drive. When
you go out on twisty road and you want to
go to some you know, rock climbing place or hiking
trail and mountain bike and that's way up some dirt
road that's really tricky. It's got to off road capability
to get you there too, and it's balancing all the
(11:00):
kind of the right way is a big trick. Um.
We're we've been working on some new sort of off
road capabilities. It's mostly electronic trickery. UM, and sort of
had to figure out where we draw the line on
making our cars taple on offer. We've always been a
completely on road company. Uh, and so we've we've sort
of drawn the line that, uh, well, there's a lot
(11:21):
of stuff you can do to make cars super capable
offer road that ruins how it drives the rest of
the time. So we've drawn the line that we won't
do anything to compromise how it drives on the road,
but we still want all the capabilities to get places. Um.
And this is the first car that we've got that's
got an offer button that changes a bunch of the settings. UM.
(11:41):
So some of the some of the kind of trick
stuff that we're doing under the skin. UM. We've got
our new all the drive system and the G Vectorian
control system, which is a very weird, subtle thing for
making the car behave in a way that feels more
natural to people. UM. So we've I'll start with the
(12:03):
G factor in control. So, UM, we found that as
you're driving, the very first moment you make the steering
input The cars are a little bit Every car is
a little bit inconsistent about how it makes that first
bit of the turn. And the reason is because you're
sitting on these theneumatic tires. It's just a balloon, right Uh.
And in its straight ahead state, both sidewalls are sort
(12:25):
of unloaded, and when you corner, one of sidewall goes
slack and one starts pulling, and that's what's pulling the
car in the corners. So there's this transition period as
the car starts to transition into that corner, and that's
where things are kind of the most nervous for the
driver's subconscious as they kind of DESI will when do
I turn and how much do I turn? And once
you get into the corner and everything feels naturally, you
(12:47):
figure out what you're doing. But people aren't really consciously nervous.
But if you watch someone's steering inputs as they turn
into a corner, a lot of times they turn in
and back off and adjust a couple of times because
they get it figured out. Uh. And so designed the
system to try to attack that subtle problem that people
didn't know they were doing. Um. And what we do
(13:08):
is we figured out that we can we can wait,
but a little bit more weight on the front tires
just as you turn. Uh. And this is a trick
that we learned from race driving. Um I used to
race rally cars racing off road in the gravel, and
the rally drivers always using the left foot on the brakes.
You turn the wheel and put a little bit of
extra weight on the front tires and it makes them
(13:28):
grab into the into the grab or turn the car. UM.
A lot of broad racing guys will do this to
one foot on the gas, one foot on the brake,
unlike on the street where you're left foots on the
clutch or just resting. But you've got one on each
of you can you can constantly adjust the weight balance
of the car. So we started sort of from that
idea and tuned it and tuned it and tuned it,
trying to make it so it's so subtle. You don't
(13:50):
feel the car slowing down to shift weight under the front,
but you do feel the response in the way the
car turns. Um And now we've got a tune. So
there's steering system. As you turn the wheel, the electric
power steering knows exactly what the put you're giving it,
so it looks at the steering speed and that communicates
with the engine computer and it tells it to reduce
(14:11):
power just a hair and it dips a little bit
of extra weight onto the front tires and tightens up
the tires so they respond more directly. Um, we don't
have any on off switch for that. They'll never feel it.
It's it's soon so well that it just kind of
just feels normal all the time. Right. We've built a
couple of cars with on off switches for that, and
it's it's really funny because it's it's it's not super obvious,
(14:35):
but it's once you kind of pick out what it's doing,
it actually makes a difference even just driving completely straight ahead,
because you don't realize is when you're driving straight you're
making constantly making little corrections, right, and if each one
of those has a little delay, and then to catch up,
you're you're constantly overshooting and coming back. And as soon
as we turn the system on, people just just settle
up because they make repression and would stick and they
(14:57):
wouldn't have to make the next one of the next
one and the next one. Um. So that's in all
of our cars now. Um that that's called g Vactric control.
We just came out with the electric control plus which
helps when you start straighten the wheel back out, um,
and the the car will sometimes be a little bit
(15:17):
slow to kind of come backing up the pull wheel
straight and so to avoid that, we actually will drag
the outside break just a hair and it suddenly just
kind of kind of helps it straight back out. You
don't again, you don't feel a break when you can
switch it on and off. What you feel is it
feels soally normal. And then if if you were to
switch the system off, you feel like steerings kind of
going yeah, gun, yeah, gun's a good but yeah, it's
(15:37):
just kind of overdamped and you kind of have to
pull it back. Um. So we're really kind of down
in the weeds of these little subtle details to get
the car to feel natural and to feel totally almost
so you don't notice all the work we did, right.
Is there like a general like description drivers have that
like now that this stuff has been corrected, or do
(15:58):
they just like say it's smoother, like you know, we've
always had a focus on this kind of area. Um,
so we've always sort of tuned our cars to feel
just feel right and just feel until it used to
be our slogan decades ago. It just feels right right.
That's It's we've kind of always been trying to do
the same thing. Um. So I don't think adding GBC
(16:20):
wasn't like a dramatic change. Was another tool in our
toolbox of all these things that we're trying to do.
If we took this system and put it on the
car built by people who didn't care about this stuff,
it wouldn't be enough to pick it right, but it's
enough to sort of add in our direction of making
the car, you know, more natural. Um. Sort of our
our ind goal is to make driving a car so
(16:43):
naturally you don't think about it. You're just you just drive,
just do exactly what you wanted to do. Um. The
whole wheel drive system in this car we mechanically is
the same as almost everybody's. You drive the front wheels,
there's a clutch where you can connect the rear wheels
sometimes when you need it and not when you don't.
And all the magic is in the software to figure
(17:03):
out when you need it when you don't exactly how much, right,
because if you're always driving the rear wheels, it uses
a lot of extra fuel and it actually UM diffront
reules have to go to the same speed when they're
locked together, and so the car doesn't want to turn,
and so you're always balancing its ability to turn with
its ability to drive the rear wheels. UM. We've come
up with a system where we're running software algorithm that's
(17:26):
basically kind of like a video game algorithm that's looking
at the vehicle speed and cornering G acceleration G hand
calculating exactly how much loaders on each tire based on
the vehicle dynamics model of how this car behaves. And
so it's constantly calculating what load is on each tire
and then distributing torque where it's needed to take advantage
of that UM, which means that this actually can expand
(17:50):
the performance envelope even on dry paving, not just in
you know, wet or slippery conditions. UM. And that lets
us use the OL wild drives to an advantage without
using it in places but we don't need it waste
fuel right UM. And then there's a couple of places
where those two ideas the g vactor control trying to
(18:12):
get the car turning in precisely, and what the oil
drive is doing where they don't get along where we're
If we're driving the rear wheels at a certain time,
it will make the car resists turning in because they're
trying to go the same speed. And so we have
to integrate those two systems so that the g vactor
control gets the authority right at the moment that it
needs the car to turn. And then when you're steady state,
it goes back and sends more to the rear, and
(18:34):
then it straights back out and can even drag a
little bit more to the rear to help. So it
is a really complicated interplayoffs software to get all these
systems and the cars to talk to each other. Uh.
And it's it has to to get it to work
at the speed that our mind is processing things so
that it feels so that we were really fast in
(18:55):
what we can recognize, UM. So to to make it
so we don't feel that it's doing something, but it
just feels seamless, and it feels like as one unit.
We had to redo a bunch of the computer hardware
in the car to communicate faster, to get the signals
from the steering into the into the thing that makes
the decisions, and then into the into the e c
U two from the to change the engine, now putta
(19:18):
to change the all world drive. Um, if I remember right,
I think we've got fifty milliseconds from steering input before
something has to happen at the other end or else
people will notice. All right, Jonathan from the booth again,
we're going to rejoin Dave a little further into that
conversation he had with us. You know, we talked about
a lot of stuff in that conversation, not all of
it pertains kind of to this human centric design concept,
(19:41):
but he gave us a little more insight into the
challenges behind making the interior of a vehicle quiet without
making it too quiet. Again, this gets to that concept
of you want to make an experience for the end user,
but you have to make sure you're giving the right experience.
It's not just an experience, but the correct one. So
(20:01):
we learned there's a very delicate balance to all of that.
Here's Dave to explain a little further. Hopefully the first
thing I'll notice is that it's quiet. You know, that
used to be a weak point of ours. Because well, again,
steering handling and n VH guys are fighting each farther,
and we always wanted our cars to handle really well
and sort of trying to elevate ourselves to the point
(20:21):
where we can have the steering handling and have the
car drive right and still be quite uncomfortable. I'm recognizing
how important that is. UM. We've sort of expanded our
our performance envelope and a lot of looking at sort
of how people hear things, what frequency ranges matter to them,
and what how it actually affects people. Um. And one
of the things we've started figure out is that we're
(20:43):
super sensitive to direction of sound, which means that if
you hear, if the sound does get into the car
and then uh, you hear reflect off the other window,
you'll pick up that reflection, maybe not consciously, but it
bothers you more than that same amount of noise just
coming one high. So we put more damping into the
(21:03):
car so that found from do get in damp out quickly.
It should be good for recording, right right. UM. And
we've also worked really a lot on isolation from outside noises,
so you don't hear the car next to you so much,
and that We're trying to strack a balance because if
you isolate too much, it's you don't practical reason became
(21:24):
the Siren's But also at a more subtle level, you
don't feel connected to what you're doing well, and you
you feel like you're not really controlling the car. You're
driving a video game, like you don't feel We want
to hear the road and feel the road just enough
to feel connected and not enough to be annoyed. And
that's the same with outside noises, like you want to
(21:45):
know that car is there, but you don't want to
know exactly what's wrong with his brakes. Jonathan, run the
boot one more time. Another thing that Dave said that
I wanted to share was about how the team worked
on the sound system for the Maths to See X
thirty and they did to put the sub whiffers in
a very special section of the vehicle and move it
(22:06):
away from the traditional place, which is within the doors.
And in order to do that, they had to communicate
and collaborate with the safety team to make sure that
this design element they wanted to include would be factored
into the structure of the vehicle from the very beginning.
Here's what Dave had to say. One of the kind
of trick ways that we improve the noise, the outside
(22:28):
noise isolation in this car and improved the audio quality
in the car was taking the big speakers out of
the doors. Everyone has their their subs in the door, right,
because that's whether you have enough room for Um, that's
a really inefficient place for a driver. Uh, in terms
of the space of the car. It's it's driving the
(22:49):
sounding that volume in the long spot. Um. And it
also is a noise path from the outside, right. So um,
we moved them up into the under the dash in
sort of in the corner of the room. Because anytime
you corner a load of speaker, the sound quality is
a lot better, right. Um. So it's a much more
efficient way to get sound in the car. So if
we don't have to put as much power in to
(23:11):
get a better sound quality at the people's ears. Um.
But also let's to steal off those doors. Um. This
is something I think everybody understood should be done. It's
incredibly hard to do because the corners of the of
the interior are actually a really critical crash structure and
there's a lot of there's a lot of other departments
(23:33):
buying for for real estate there right, Because the if
you crash into something, the load from the bumper goes
into the frame rails, which go right back into that
corner of the car, and that's where the load has
to stop crumpling things. We want everything in front of
the windshield to crumple and everything inside not too. And
so that's a really strong structural corner. So normally you
develop a car, you develt a crash structure first and
(23:55):
then everybody gets to work on after those. And we
had to get this concept of trying to move the
speakers up into the corners before we started the platform development,
to say, hey, crash guys, you have a space for
the speaker while you're doing that, and build that concept
in all right, and and so it was a really
sort of big accomplishment for us to pull off logistically.
(24:17):
Dave was a lot of fun to talk to, and
he helped us understand how these decisions to craft a
specific experience manifest in actual real world decisions and engineering choices. Now,
these are things I typically take for granted. Whenever I
use a product, I generally only think, you know, something like, wow,
this thing is really easy to use or wow, this
(24:39):
is a lot of fun, or sometimes on the flip side,
because not everything is positive. Sometimes I think, who the
heck thought this was a good design choice? Is so
inconvenient it's hard to get to. If you ever had
a user interface where you've had to navigate, you know,
five steps beyond what you thought would be necessary, you
know what I'm talking about. It's it ends up being
(25:00):
so frustrating that it actually creates a disincentive for you
to use the technology. But I rarely give it much
more consideration than that sort of surface level. But talking
with engineers really reveals how much thought has to go
into this, and it also explains that sometimes it goes
wrong because you have multiple groups all trying to get
(25:23):
their various pieces of the puzzle into place, and sometimes
that means that their peace and someone else's piece, while
they were meant to fit together, don't. They might overlap,
they might conflict, they might be a gap between them.
Those sort of things can happen when things don't go well.
Now we're going to take another quick break, but when
(25:43):
we come back, will rejoin me in the Mazda c
X thirty. All right, So now we're gonna pick back
up with me at the auto show, So you're gonna
hear the audio audio quality change again, and I'll be
talking about the importance of collaboration and communication, and away
(26:06):
we go. That ends up saving a lot of time
in the design process there. I've seen a lot of
different products come out where it was only in the
testing phase that they realized that there were these sort
of issues, and then it just meant having to go
back through a redesign process, and typically it tends to
be very similar to the first design process, which means
you still have that problem of these isolated silos, these
(26:29):
isolated departments that are each working towards their own goal
and not collaborating closely enough to get the end result
they want. So that's a huge challenge in design in general.
So you get to the point where you've built your solution,
you've tested your solution, Uh, your systems are not in isolation,
(26:51):
You've figured that part out, You've got your systems all
working together, and then you see how well it works
on paper, and then you throw people into it and
eyes you know technology. I've I've often told this to
people when I talk about my role at the podcast Realm.
You know, I've got a lot of podcast friends, a
(27:11):
lot of coworkers who do great work in all sorts
of fields. But they're talking about stuff like, you know,
society and culture and and and money and stuff. What
don't make sense, y'all. Technology, it makes sense. It either
works or it doesn't. I have the easiest job, don't
tell anyone. But when you throw people into things, it
(27:34):
gets messy because people they have expectations, they have desires,
they have motivations, they have things that technology on its
own does not have. As long as sky net has
not yet gone you know completely, you know, self aware.
I'm assuming that we're okay at the moment, but yeah,
(27:56):
people make things complicated. When people are involved, you then
have to really evaluate what your work actually means in
the real world. I want to give you, guys an
example that's unrelated to vehicles for a moment to kind
of explain what I'm thinking about here. I once intended
to talk with some roboticists who were talking about the
(28:18):
challenges they faced when they were trying to design a
robot that would that would interact with humans within a
human space, and that is a difficult thing to really engineer.
To create a robot that can seamlessly interact with humans.
So they sat down and they identified their various goals
(28:40):
and objectives. They sat down and said, all right, these
are the things that are important to us. We need
to make sure that our robot does these things. And
they were parameters like this is how close a robot
can get to another human being before it has to
stop because otherwise it's going to be crowding someone. Or
this is how close a robot can get to a
stationary object. This is how fast the robots should move
(29:02):
through the environment. This is how the robot should respond
if someone were to address it. So a whole list
of rules that they had to figure out and then design,
and this took months and months and months of testing.
There was a point where a robot was staring at
a door for two hours trying to figure out how
to open it. That's the sort of stuff we're talking about.
(29:25):
They solve all these problems and then they put the
robot into an actual human environment, and that's when everything
went pear shaped, I guess we could say, because they
realized that the human beings in that particular environment had
an expectation of how the robot was supposed to behave.
It was a robot, but the robot wasn't behaving the
(29:45):
way they thought a robot should behave. The robot was
behaving the way the engineers had thought the robots should
behave based on the way humans behave within the same
sort of social space. Now that meant that the people
who were actually encountering the robot, we're uncomfortable around the robot.
It felt weird. It was the sort of Uncanny Valley,
(30:06):
except instead of appearance, it was in behavior. So uncanny valley,
for those who are not familiar, is this gap when
you start to approach something that appears to be alive
but still has certain elements that indicate it is not
truly alive. We usually use it to describe things like
c G I characters, where a c G I character
(30:27):
looks almost but not quite real. The same thing is
true with behaviors. So the roboticists discovered that these robots
were not performing the way they needed to, that people
were not responding to them the way that they had
anticipated because it wasn't robotic enough. They actually had to
go back to the drawing board and go through and
(30:49):
start rethinking their whole process of creating robots that could
interact in social spaces and make them more robotic. That
was a fail. You're of an approach of a human
centric design in the sense that the people creating the
robots had not anticipated that human reaction, and it shows
(31:10):
that when you throw humans into an equation, things get
a little more complicated. It's not as straightforward as saying
this particular piece of technology needs to do task in
why amount of time and it has to have a
certain level of reliability. It means more than that. It
(31:31):
means defining things like a feeling, intention, defining how a
person should experience the technology. And this goes well beyond technology. Obviously,
it goes to everything that we ever designed. But really
in tech, it's something that you either get or you don't,
and if you get it when you're designing, you can
(31:53):
create something that actually has a legit special feeling when
you experience it. It's a very tough challenge because obviously,
the other big issue you have is that people are different.
You know, we have general things that kind of unite us,
but we're all individuals. We all have our own preferences,
(32:14):
our own things that that maybe annoy us, uh and
our own expectations, so it also means having to identify
which ones are the most important to whatever end result
you're looking for. So one of the things that really
we heard a lot when we were here over in
the auto show over at Mazda's this this concept of
(32:37):
feel alive, that you want to feel alive when you're
actually using the vehicle, and vehicles are such an important
central piece of technology in our lives. That is not
a small task, and it's not lips service. It's not
something that is just a tagline. It's a guiding philosophy.
(32:58):
That's the philosophy that guides the decisions that the engineers
are making in order to make a vehicle that is
fun to drive, that it's safe, that's efficient, that it
has all the things you expect a vehicle to have,
but that when you are behind the wheel and you're
actually driving it, you have the sensation of feeling alive.
That's sort of exhilarating feeling, and that it's something that
(33:22):
goes beyond just your experience behind the wheel. It's something
that is actually integrated into your experience of moving through
an environment. So when you start thinking about that, you're
thinking not just trying to define everything that's on a
dashboard or just an easy reach of the driver. You're
thinking about an experience that goes well beyond that, as
(33:43):
the driver's maneuvering through different environments. That ends up being
a very important concept to guide all of your design philosophies.
And I was really impressed with the passion that I
encountered when I talked with people from Mazda. All shared
that same sort of uh, deep desire to create that
(34:06):
kind of experience. And this is not something that is
easy to engineer. It's not something you typically hear from engineers. Uh.
This also kind of brings us to a dichotomy I
tend to encounter in the field of technology. Broadly speaking,
there are two major camps I tend to encounter when
(34:27):
I'm looking at different types of gadgets and vehicles and
things like that. One is that I see a camp
that really emphasizes esthetic over everything else, so that the
look of it is supposed to be extremely evocative and
that it makes you want to use it in some way,
(34:48):
but that is the guiding principle behind the design. The
other I've seen is a more I think of it
as the engineering approach in the sense that it needs
to work, it needs to be able to do the
things that it was supposed to do. Uh, And that
becomes primary and aesthetic is is secondary, or maybe tertiary,
or maybe for some companies, not really a thing that
(35:11):
anyone thinks about. Uh. I'm sure many of you have
owned gadgets out there that fall into that category where
you think this thing is ugly as sin. It does
what it's supposed to do, but I don't like to
look at it. The real goal, I think, is trying
to bridge the gap between those two different philosophies, bringing
together the aesthetic and the desire to get the engineering
(35:34):
just right. Uh. I think a lot about my experience
with different things like mobile devices. That's the one that
I always think about about how I've had experiences with
ones where it looks really nice, it looks really sexy,
looks like it would go fast just standing still, and
others that it doesn't look so good, but you can
(35:55):
definitely see how everything works. Uh. And maybe you have
to learn the peculiarities of that particular system in order
for you to have a deeper appreciation, but you once
you do, it works just fine. Marrying those two is
really challenging, but it's also a very important part of
this human centric focus. Knowing that people do value both
(36:18):
the aesthetic and the function of a device, and again
for something as important as a vehicle, it becomes even
more imperative that you get that just right. So to
achieve this, it's all the all these different processes, all
these different philosophies I've talked about, have to come together.
We heard about how at Mazda they are still very
(36:43):
focused on very traditional ways of modeling, say the exterior
of a car, doing it through clay first and sculpting
it so that you can get exactly the right feel.
You know, you can very carefully shave away a tiny
slow ver of clay in order to get just the
right shape or just the right curve, and doing all
(37:05):
of that to meticulous detail until you do a full
scan of it and three D and then maybe then
at that point you can go to additive manufacturing, like
a three D printing sort of approach and create your
first three D printed version of the thing that you
have sculpted out of clay. They talked about how even
(37:25):
getting to a point where you could build the full
sized version of uh like a door, for example, that
if it wasn't just right, their engineers would take hand
uh handcrafted approaches to making sure they got exactly the
(37:47):
curve that they wanted in order to achieve the result
that they were going for. And that kind of level
of attention to detail is something that I find really inspiring.
It's also kind of intimidating you think about the scale
that that requires, and uh, that's not something that's easily
tackled either. So it's I feel like this is one
(38:10):
of those cases where you hear about the philosophy and
then you hear the stories behind it, and you really
feel that that you're talking to a company that's that's
walking the walk. They're not just talking the talk, they
really follow through with that, uh, and that to me
is really exciting. So I hope that I'm able to
(38:30):
kind of illustrate to you this incredible journey the the
from the point where you actually identify what it is
you want to do to the point of seeing it
come together and all the different challenges that face you
along the way. Uh. There are so many different examples
of that with any kind of technology, including vehicles, where
(38:53):
you can look at this and say, like if if
one of these systems didn't work just right, then it
would affect everything else. It becomes a cascading effect, and
no matter how good the design is on other elements
of the vehicle, you would still fall short of your goal.
And it really does drive home how enormous a challenge
this is. So I think they're playing me off. No,
(39:17):
I think that this has been an incredible experience for me.
This is an awesome studio. I can't wait to have
it installed in Atlanta. Uh everyone's laughing. Okay, well it
would still be great. I think uh Tari would have
fewer instances of me having you know, Diva fits in
(39:39):
the studio if I were recording in something like this
every single episode. Uh. Plus, I mean, there's it's spacious.
I could have so many guests in a single episode
and we could all have our own, our own nice
comfortable seats. I'm just really, it's a practical thing. I'm saying,
Like my studio back in Atlanta, we can fit maybe
three people in there before we get it's crowded. This time,
(40:01):
I can cram a lot of folks in here, including
sound engineers. So Tary it benefits you too, is what
I'm saying, but I want to think masdo for having
me come out here and to experience this and to
get a firsthand look at the culmination of this idea.
I've heard a lot about this philosophy. I've talked to
(40:22):
people who have been sort of really passionate about the
concept behind human centric design, but it's rare that I
actually get an experience, a truly immersive experience, because I
am actually in it where I see the fruition of that.
And when you get a chance to see that and
you you understand the decisions that went behind all those
(40:45):
design choices, you get a deeper appreciation for that process
and all the work that goes into just making something
actually happen. I think we all take for granted what
it makes to create a piece of technology like this.
You know, we might think of the manufacturing process, because
(41:06):
that's one that is easy to illustrate. It's you see
the factory line, But it's so much more than that.
The process takes years of work, years of engineering, years
of iterating and building upon past uh learnings, and two
continue to innovate on top of that. It is a
(41:26):
really interesting and inspiring experience to actually see this in person.
With that, I think I'm gonna wrap up because, um,
you know, I think I think i've I've covered it
pretty well. And plus I really want to have a
little more experience jumping around in the back seat of
this thing, because I've been saying in the front the
(41:47):
whole time and I haven't even experienced what the back
seats like. And I don't think anyone's gonna stop me
as long as I hold a microphone in my hand.
So I'm going to sign off, but don't tell anyone
who's actually here that I've done that. I'll just I'll
pretend like I'm still point. Oh they're broadcasting the whole
thing right now. Okay, well, alright, so on that. No, guys,
we're gonna wrap up this episode. Remember if you want
(42:10):
to reach out to me, text stuff at how stuff
works dot com, or you can pop onto Facebook or Twitter.
That's tech stuff hs W and uh, I look forward
to talking to you again really soon. And it's Jonathan
back in the studio. So I want to thank Mazda
for having me out at the auto show and getting
(42:30):
a chance to experience just a tiny sliver of the
work that they put into the c x thirty. You know,
I didn't get a chance to ride in it, but
it was really cool getting to see it up close
and actually sit in it and record an episode. It
was a fun experience. And uh and everyone there, by
the way, was incredibly kind and very helpful. So I
(42:52):
had a really good experience with everybody over there. So
thank you guys a lot. You guys are awesome. It
also reminded me that with every piece of technology I encounter,
no matter what it might be, there typically dozens or
hundreds or maybe even thousands of people who helped shape
that technology, maybe a little bit, maybe they helped define it,
but they all had their impact on that technology before
(43:15):
I ever got a chance to touch it. And that
when it all goes right, when everything is falling into
place properly, when people are able to collaborate, when they're
able to communicate, then they can produce technology in turn
creates a specific experience that reflects whatever the original intent
was of the design team. That comes to the very
(43:36):
goal of human centric design. And again, this is not
an easy thing to achieve. It is incredibly challenging. You
might define what you want people to feel like, but
then it may turn out that when people actually experience
the product, they feel something entirely different, and that you
could argue that that represents a failure on your part
(43:59):
as far as the design goes, and you have to
factor in human psychology and human behaviors that aren't something
that are so easy to quantify. As you know, how
efficient an engine is running, or how long a tire
can can be in service before you need to replace it.
Those are things that you can quantify much more easily.
(44:21):
So this human centric design philosophy is something that I
think is really fascinating, incredibly challenging, and when you get
it right, amazingly satisfying. All right, Well, that wraps up
this episode. And I know I gave a sign off
in the live section, but you know, I I feel
like if I don't do it again, I'm not really
doing my job. If you guys have suggestions for topics
(44:43):
you would like me to cover in future episodes of
tech Stuff, you can reach out via email the addresses
tech stuff at how stuffworks dot com, or you can
pop onto Facebook or Twitter the handle for both of
those Text Stuff hs W. You can also pop on
over to our website that tech Stuff Podcast dot com.
You'll find an archive of every episode that we've ever
(45:04):
recorded and published. It's all there's searchable. So if there's
a specific topic you would you know I want to
know more about, you can search and see if I've
already done an episode on it, and if not, then
use the aforementioned ways to get in touch with me
and let me know about it and I'll get right
on it. And also there's a link to our online
store where every purchasing make goes to help the show,
and we greatly appreciate it, and I will talk to
(45:27):
you again and really soon. Text Stuff is a production
of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts
from I heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app,
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