One pitch to define the cockpit
Stellantis was deciding who would shape the next generation of its in-car experience. We had a single opportunity to make the case, not with a feature list but with a vision compelling enough to win the partnership and shape what came next.
That vision had to pull together everything the car is becoming. Autonomous driving, navigation, entertainment, trip planning, voice, and AI, all on one edge-to-edge display, for driver and passenger alike. The challenge was never fitting it all on screen. It was making that convergence feel calm and coherent instead of crowded: a cockpit that anticipates what you need, and gets out of the way when you don't.
Ultrawide canvas in the car
The canvas was a 3840 by 720 display running pillar to pillar across the dashboard, the widest screen a car has offered. That scale was the opportunity and the problem at once. Three constraints shaped every decision.
A screen too big to treat like a screen
At pillar-to-pillar width, no one can physically reach across the display, and scattering apps across it just reads as clutter. The layout needed a structure occupants could parse at a glance, and a way to move content to whoever needs it.
Two people, one surface
Driver and passenger share the same glass but want different things at the same time, and neither should interrupt the other. Each needed their own space, their own controls, and even their own audio, without the experience splintering into two disconnected systems.
It is still a car
Everything on screen competes with the driver's attention. Driving-critical information had to stay glanceable and anchored where the driver already looks. The more the cabin can do, the more deliberately it has to protect focus.
Turn a screen into a system
All three constraints pointed to the same underlying problem. A display this wide only works if it stops being a screen full of apps and becomes a system with rules: where things live, how they stack, how they resize, and how they move between people.
The hardest constraint, safety, turned out to be the answer. Rather than laying out the screen by aesthetics, I started from what the driver can actually reach and glance at, and let that define the zones. Structure came from ergonomics first, which made this an information architecture problem before it was a visual one.
Let safety define the structure, and the rest can be flexible.
The principle behind the cockpit
A system built from the driver outward
With the reach study as the foundation, the architecture came together as a handful of clear rules. The canvas divides into zones by function and by who they serve, anchored at the driver and extending out to the passenger. Windows layer in a fixed priority, so voice and urgent alerts always surface on top. Every element snaps to one of four standard sizes. And every function is mapped to a region for each vehicle state, so the cockpit shows the right things whether the car is parked, driving, or driving itself. Together these rules let a screen this large stay calm while it recomposes around the drive.
One drive, end to end
To pressure-test the architecture, I designed it as a single continuous drive rather than a set of disconnected screens, following a driver and passenger from the moment they get in, through a long EV trip to Hearst Castle and back. The drive exercises every state the system has to handle: welcome, park, reverse, manual drive, and self-driving.
Three threads run through all of it: driver and passenger doing different things in parallel, the cockpit reshaping itself as the context changes, and the AI acting as a co-pilot that asks rather than takes over.
How I approached it
The whole concept came together in about a month and a half. On that pitch timeline, with an oversized blank canvas, I worked from the ground up: constraints first, structure second, screens last. Designing the system before the visuals kept an ambitious brief coherent.
Part of the groundwork was studying where pillar-to-pillar cockpits and connected-car interfaces are heading, from shipping systems to concept cars:
Build the system before the screens
The groundwork is the information architecture above: a driver reach study, then every function mapped to a region for each vehicle state, then the zones, layering, and window sizes. None of it was visual yet. The rules had to hold before a single screen was drawn.
Design the whole drive, low to high fidelity
Only then did I draw screens, and as one continuous drive rather than isolated frames, first in low fidelity to test placement, density, and feel across every state, then in high fidelity to make the future tangible for the pitch.
The low-fidelity exploration the high-fidelity screens were built from, one continuous drive, tested for placement and feel across every state:
Final Deliverable
What I took away
While the pitch did not win, the work stands as one of the most valuable projects I have led. It was my first time owning an effort at this scale, steering an ambitious brief from a blank canvas all the way to a complete, believable vision.
The lesson that stuck: structure is what makes ambition hold together. Bringing all of it onto a single screen only stayed coherent because the information architecture, grounded in safety and reach, came before any visual. That discipline, system first and screens second, is what I now carry into every ambiguous, oversized problem.