Virtual workshops on the road : Co-designing with drivers, within context in real-time

An investigation was performed of the characteristics of real-time, virtually present, contextual inquiry between automobile drivers and automotive designers. 28 participants were remotely interviewed while they were in one of two contexts: either sitting in a bare isolated meeting room or when operating a driving simulator. Open questions of the type involved in concept design were used as the basis of the real time interview. The interview transcripts were analysed by means of discourse analysis, thematic analysis and evaluations of degree of creativity. The results revealed that the real time automotive interview context provided richer information in terms of the quantity of the words expressed, the variety of the words expressed, and in terms of the judged degree of creativity of the statements.