From Traditional to Electronic Large Displays in Automotive Design

The ability to display and interact with large scale representations of vehicles has always been a fundamental requirement of the automotive design industry. This requirement has traditionally manifested itself in a variety of mediums, including full scale blueprints, tape drawings, and 3D clay models. More recently, automotive design studios have begun to explore the use of large scale digital displays in their design workflow. Often, the applications of these displays have direct analogues with traditional techniques; in other cases, new applications are evolving that use these displays to visualize and interact with design content in new ways. An interesting attribute of this evolution is that − unlike the desktop computer with its "one size fits all" universality − the size, resolution, and level of interactivity of these large displays and their applications vary depending on the physical and social setting of the task at hand. In this paper, we first explore the traditional uses of large non-electronic displays in automotive design, followed by the current applications of large electronic displays. We then present new applications that make innovative use of large format displays. These applications fulfill both traditional workflow requirements and suggest new workflows that respect the physical environment and social mores of the user.