Source: Ashley Rose

Scenario: You’re driving on a right-most lane, and eventually see a parked car half a block ahead of you. You put on the left turn signal to indicate your intension to yield to the left lane, while immediately notice that there is a car almost parallel to you. But as soon as you put on the signal, this driver politely slows down the car to give you space for merging. After the safe and smooth transition, you gently wave left hand to the driver to show your appreciation.

One day I was chatting with my Japanese friend about this scenario, and expressed my interest in such an unnoticeable and automatic driving manner. My friend said that the younger drivers in Japan has a funny new gesture to thank the way-giving drivers: after taking the way, you can say “thank you” by flashing your hazard light exactly twice. I like to call it “wink wink” or “SAN-KYUU” (Thank-you in Janglish). With some imagination, you can almost see a visual bowing.

Humbleness is an important value in Japanese culture. Western people are sometimes amazed by how often the Japanese bow for everything: bow down to customers, bow down to friends, bow down to drivers who slow down to let them cross the road, bow down to high school textbooks that they’re about to discard, and so on. They are taught to do that since they are born.

Also, esthetic and cuteness is an innate attribute to almost all things Japanese. Adding cute illustrations to product packaging, object design or serious issues can lighten the annoyance of some bad user experiences. I like to relate this cute Japanese design to the book Emotional Design (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotional_Design), in which the usability specialist Don Norman argues that a product design with prettier interface can actually work better.

For example, with humbleness and cuteness combined, this is what you can see at fence of a construction site:

Source: Bakoko on Flickr

Anyways, coming back to the driving manner issue, I once read that some Japanese car manufacturers are planning to integrate gestural display into the taillight, allowing drivers to show happy face, emoticon or other simple message to the cars behind. While unable to find more information about such design, I found this car accessory instead: Drivemocion (http://www.au-my.com/product.aspx?product_id=1&lang=English)

I am still very curious about how the western and eastern car manufacturers see the driving behavior and cultural context, and create designs that not only focusing on personal driving experience and comforts, but also encouraging people “to be a good citizen” that play well with other drivers on the road. Changing behavior through design, and hopefully transforming people into nicer, more harmonic attitude, would be an ideal outcome of such change.