Scram Studio

In 2016, new electric car company Nio released their supercar, the EP9. The car was built as a proof of concept that a supremely powerful supercar could be built with an electric engine, and that a company new to the game could manufacture a real and impressively fast vehicle.

The EP9 was designed and built from scratch in record time, just 18 months, from the outer shell to the four-screen user experience, which was created by a team including myself at London design studio, forpeople.

I worked with interaction designers to figure out how the different elements would appear, disappear, move and react based on the data from the car and the passenger themself. We wrote a set of rules to make the interface exciting and reactive, and to make each movement feel part of the car’s design, and as part of the Nio brand as a whole. We built a microsite to give to the developers tasked with building the UI enough information to translate our vision into a functional system.

As a supercar made to go at breakneck speed, it was designed to be driven by a trained racing driver with the owner as passenger, so the passenger experience was as important to deliver as the driving functions. Four screens were needed to deliver information to the driver and passenger, and had to compete with the exhilaration of travelling at up to 194mph.