For those of you who regularly follow this blog, it won't come as much of a surprise to learn that during 2009, we closely followed Ford of North America's sustainability and design work, so we thought it would be fun to pull together some of the best bits in a video - five minutes of Ford:
The video makes me realise how many interesting and genuine people we've met at Ford over the past year - thanks to all of those who gave us their time and made us feel so welcome. Ford has had a good year - especially compared to GM and Chrysler, but that doesn't mean it should rest on its laurels. As you can see from my last article - The 2009 Ford Hedge - we don't think they're front runners in the green space, but that's not to say they're not doing some interesting things. You can dig deeper into our archive, by searching our Ford tagged articles, which will flag up everything from the past year. Personal highlights included interviewing J Mays, Sue Cischke telling us about Ford's interest in things like Zipcar and High Speed Rail - and the response pieces from Dan Sturges, Amy and Robb, and Drew Smith.
And, just for laughs and because it's Christmas, here's one of our favourite videos of the year. For anyone seduced into believing that car companies can suddenly get good at in-car IT, enjoy our hysteria as we try to use the voice recognition of Ford's Sync, on a 2009 Mercury Mariner.
Posted by Joseph Simpson on 22nd December 2009
Full disclosure - Ford of North America sponsored the Movement Design Bureau's research work during 2009
I did my PhD on how people use speech recognition interfaces. :)
Designing something like that Sync system so that it was usable and useful would be super hard. I would actually shy away from using speech recognition for something like controlling the ICE. There are too many options that are non-sequential.
Posted by: Ben Kraal | December 25, 2009 at 10:29 AM