The car industry is taking a big step in developing a new driving experience. With autonomous driving (AD), cars will in a couple of years be able to drive themselves and give the driver freedom to focus on other things to do instead of driving. This will change the way we look at driving today and how we interact with the car. As industrial design engineers we strive to make sure that the needs of the user are met and the demands of the industry will be fulfilled.

Volvo Cars are working on developing autonomous cars and one of their main goals is to let the drivers feel the freedom to do what they truly want while having a premium driving experience. To achieve this feeling of freedom Volvo need to fulfill a number of requirements. One requirement is the lean-back position which gives the driver more space and freedom to focus on other tasks than driving. However when the driver enters this position they will be out of reach of using the car’s displays and infotainment system. This bachelor thesis focuses on designing a lean-back interaction which lets the driver effortlessly use the infotainment system from the lean-back position, while still be able to sit back and relax. Today there are no fully developed autonomous cars on the market, Volvo aims to release their own autonomous cars in 2021. Volvo have identified different behaviors of commuting people which correspond to different user needs in autonomous driving. The objective of this project has been to explore user needs in AD and to create a concept which improves the interaction with the car’s infotainment system in a lean-back position, while fulfilling the needs of the users. The goal was to design a concept that shows how the interaction should look like, so Volvo could further develop this and later implement it in an autonomous car by the year 2021. The concept should be delivered through a presentation of findings in research, user tests and visualizations compiled in this more detailed project report.

Throughout the project a Human-Centered Design (HCD) approach has been used to make sure that the users always were involved in the design process, as the user played a central role in understanding the problem and developing the concept. By using the right design methods in each stage of the process we managed to answer the research questions and achieve the project goals.