“Smile” is one of the concepts for a studio project sponsored by General Motors Design done in fall 2014. In this sponsored project, College for Creative Studies MFA students had been asked to design a new experience to strengthen the brand for Chevrolet’s small car segment in the United States. In this project, our group came up with the idea of strengthening their brand for beginner drivers and their parents.
“Smile” is an application that can provide peace of mind for parents and build teens’ driving habits while they enjoy it. This application is designed in 2 versions, one for parents and one for teens.
By using the “Smile (parents)” application, parents can set up rules for their teenager’s driving habits. They can set up rules for speeding, volume, seat belt usage, touching their phone, etc. They can also request for a report of their teen’s trips and habits.
For teenagers, there is a “Smile (teens)” application that can sync to their Chevrolet car. Teens also can review the rules set by their parents in their application. By obeying the rules, teens can gain points in the application and by disobeying them they will lose points. By reaching a certain amount of points, some package can become unlocked in the “Smile (teens)” application. Teenagers can use these packages to customize their cars in an augmented reality world. They can change color, add different accessories and go crazy with their creativity. We called this crazy augmented reality world “Chevy World”. Teenagers can see the crazy face of the Chevy cars by scanning them with their phones. There is also a “like” button on the screen to give these virtually customized cars likes. Each car in the “Chevy World” has its own rank based on the number of likes it has gained. If a teen is more creative with their customization, they can obviously get more likes from other users. There is also a table section in the “Smile teens” application, so they can check their overall ranking in “Chevy World.”

As soon as teens reach the age that they are legally permitted to drive, parents lose their peace of mind. Parents know that teenage drivers are fresh and inexperienced, which may cause serious problems for them (Ages 15-24 represents 14% of the US population, while 30% of the accidents and injuries on the roads are related to this group). Since most of the times parents are the first car buyers for their children, we tried to focus on parents market. We knew that by giving them a peace of mind, we can attract their attention in the market. But how could we attract parents’ attention without ruining Chevrolet’s brand image for teenage drivers?
Right now, there are some products and applications in the market that try to attract parents’ attention by providing them tools to control their beginner drivers such as track control, speed control, volume control, etc. There are also some applications that provide a report of teens’ driving habits, but the problem with all the existing solutions is that parents are more active than teens in the process. Obviously teens don’t enjoy this experience because they hate being controlled and, surprisingly, they are the most important side of this experience. Our solution to this problem was to balance this experience between parents and teenagers using gamification.
In our research we found out teens are looking for credit and uniqueness, which can be a huge factor to influence their driving habits (for instance, some of them want to gain credits by racing on the streets and some want to get credit being a careful driver). Therefore we tried to use this factor to bring a new experience for teenagers.
By using “Smile,” teens could be unique. Each one of them could have his/her own customized car (virtually) in an augmented reality world based on the points they have gained from their safe drive. They could check each other’s customized car by scanning it with their phone and rank it by giving it a like. By gaining a like, teens