In the digital car seat

Designing a car seat is complicated and can take months to conceptualize and engineer. In fact, it is one of the most complex car systems to design, second only to the engine.

Accenture was challenged to create a new approach to product design that would slash the timeline and bring the car seat into the modern, digital era.

For millions of drivers, the seats we spend hours in feel like a sore counterpoint to the otherwise pleasant experience of riding in a modern automobile. Uncomfortable, impersonal and primitive, they offer nothing if not room for improvement.

But what if the car seat were smarter—intelligent enough to provide a better driving experience? Accenture Labs is making this a reality by giving the car seat a 21st century makeover. As part of the digital reinvention of industrial manufacturing known as Industry X, the team rethought the engineering process behind the humble bucket seat, adopting an intelligence-driven, adaptive design.

Accenture Labs' product engineering begins with conceptualization through crowdsourcing and artificial intelligence, progresses with design aided by virtual and augmented reality technologies, and concludes with prototyping that uses cutting-edge tools to cut costs and time. This approach can make a tremendous impact on the automotive industry, for example, in which the manufacturing process can take as long as 36 months, with prototyping and simulation accounting for one-third of total costs.

Accenture Labs mined data across major social platforms to find out what people were saying about car seats. From this, they extracted trends using AI algorithms to paint an accurate picture of the features consumers are actually interested in.

Using Accenture’s Digital Talent Broker, they quickly assembled a team of skilled workers with relevant experience to cull through the information and identify the top problems voiced across social media.