Over the last 100 years it has become much easier to operate a car. However in recent years the number of functions a user can control while driving has greatly increased. Infotainment, entertainment and comfort systems as well as driver assistance contribute to this trend. Interaction with these systems plays an important role, as on one hand this can improve the user experience while driving but on the other hand it may distract from the primary task of driving. User interfaces in cars differ regarding the number of input and output devices and their placement in the car to a great extent. In this paper, we introduce a first design space for driver-based automotive user interfaces that allows a comprehensive description of input and output devices in a car with regard to placement and modality. This design space is intended to provide a basis for analyzing and discussing different user interface arrangements in cars, to compare alternative user interface setups, and to identify new opportunities for interaction and placement of controls. We present a graphical representation of the design space and discuss its usage in detail based on several examples. To assess the completeness of the proposed design space we used it to classify and compare user interfaces from more than 100 cars shown at IAA2007, cars from the BMW museum, and from the A2Mac1 image database.

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Cars offer an increasing number of infotainment systems as well as comfort functions that can be controlled by the driver. In our research, we investigate new interaction techniques that aim to make it easier to interact with these systems while driving. We suggest utilizing the steering wheel as an additional interaction surface. In this paper, we present two user studies conducted with a working prototype of a multi-touch steering wheel. In the first, we developed a user-defined steering wheel gesture set, and in the second, we applied the identified gestures and compared their application to conventional user interaction with infotainment systems in terms of driver distraction. The main outcome was that driver's visual demand is reduced significantly by using gestural interaction on the multi-touch steering wheel.