By: Dan McSwain
Moving the Mapbox developer toolset into the automotive world is Angela Tam’s quest. In her new role with Mapbox, Angela will be defining future feature work for navigation, collaborating with both Design Research and Design Engineering members on the UX team to test and build out these visions, and working alongside Brennan Boblett and our navigation, mobility and automotive design teams. She’ll also collaborate with our SDK Engineering teams to bring the design visions from Auto into our SDKs so our developers can be empowered to build better auto nav experiences from the start.
Angela joins Mapbox from NIO, where she led out the entire UI system in-car across instrument cluster, center console, and heads up display for their electric and autonomous vehicles.
Her diverse background across Navigation, Media, Voice, and more have helped Angela formulate a vision for how these experiences best support the driver in today’s world, as well as the future. Before NIO, Angela also led out design experiences for Pebble where they reimagined the entire smartwatch product, and at LG where she also envisioned the interface and user experience for their smart TV line of products.
These are excerpts from Angela’s Q&A. Want Angela to answer something we didn’t ask? Tweet your question to @mapbox and hold tight.
What draws you into this work: The cars? Or the tech?
I really like working on projects that don’t have templates or things that you can borrow from, so you can kind of start fresh. That’s really nice because all of your colleagues have never done it before. Everyone is in some way new to it, but you bring in your own expertise to create something that the world hasn’t seen.
I’m interested in how we use design and technology to actually free people during mundane tasks like commuting. That time can actually be free to learn another language or thinking about how to change the world. There’s so much that people can gain during three hours of commuting back and forth. And so the idea of freeing people with time, it’s very interesting and powerful.
You discovered Mapbox when you worked at NIO. What drew you to the platform?
I was really frustrated working with Google Maps. As a designer I would want to tailor the design to be more holistic. You don’t want to design something in a piecemeal way. I was looking for customizable maps and I thought maybe there’s like a very simple program that I can use to change the background color of the map or the roads. The idea of being able to change anything was really an eye-opener. And it was really fun to change it. And of course then it made our design much, much better and we could actually sell it with the upper management.
Do you have any kind of predictions short term or long term for the autonomous vehicle space?
I don’t think anything is unlikely anymore. The problem is in regulations. Government is waking up to new technologies and their safety requirements. While we’re working to create designs, it seems difficult for regulators to technically know what are and are not safe features. There’s almost nothing on the road for them to actually go out and test it.
What do you think will be different about the world in 10 years?
There’s so much to do in really interesting spaces like data and location. Mapbox is kind of in the center of it all. Google is such a big company, but they haven’t really thought about a lot of these things. To me, it’s really fascinating the ways startups are questioning these giants and waking them up in a sense.
I’m interested in painting things that require raw material and turning them into something new, or something creative, that you can show. I really love the idea of keeping in touch with the vintage and where we came from. So I don’t particularly like everything that is in the technical world. I still like pens and pencils, drawing with them, things that are physical. I do like the idea of combining technology and art together and sort of like projection art. There’s a lot of things that are super interesting to me that can be combined together.
If you could have one mentor or influence or friend or somebody who you think is cool, come work with you at Mapbox, who would it be?
Helen Keller. She always influenced me in a way that I never thought of the world. She created so much for herself. There’s really no limit to what people can do and achieve. And I love working with people like that. One of the major reasons, aside from all the core technology and the projects that I wanted to work at Mapbox, is the people that I interviewed with. I love working with Brennan. He’s really humble. He also tells you what he knows and there’s nothing that he’s hiding, and I really love that transparency because then the partnership builds on trust.
Dan McSwain - VP Brand Marketing - Mapbox | LinkedIn
NIO in-car UI designer Angela Tam joins as Principal Designer for Automotive and Autonomous UX was originally published in Points of interest on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.