A couple of years back, I upgraded from an old 2001 Mitsubishi Eclipse to a new 2014 Mazda CX5. The CX5 came with an inbuilt GPS on the dashboard. While this might not seem as a big deal today but having struggled with a slew of solutions to mount a portable GPS on the dashboard of the Eclipse, this was a great feature and a good example of the concept of ‘object-orientedeness’ as defined in the context of the Activity Theory. It took into account my (the subject’s) objective/goal of getting to a destination and aided that process by providing easily accessible navigation options.

Furthermore, it has a blind spot detection system which is comprised of an LED in the side mirrors that lights up if there is another vehicle on the blind spot and beeps if you are indicating to turn in that direction and there is potential collision hazard. While now I rely on this feature so much that I almost cannot drive another vehicle without this feature, this was not always the case. Coming from an Eclipse which did not have blind spot detection this was distracting, annoying and sometimes dangerous (due to the distraction). The CX5’s interface accommodates for the concept of internalization-externalization as defined in context of the Activity Theory by providing an option to turn it off – I would turn it on for sometime in the beginning (and then turn it off) till I got used to it and finally internalized it. Now I do not even need to turn my head to look at the led. My peripheral vision can account for the led and I am synced to the beep enough to rely on the whole blind spot detection system without having to expend any extra effort. The ability to turn it on and off helped me ease into it and internalize it.

Last but not the least, the CX5 takes into account my social context as defined in context of the Activity Theory. It provides a Bluetooth sync up for my phone which allows me to see the caller’s number for incoming calls and attend the call hands free. Unlike receiving a call while driving my Eclipse, wherein I had to take my eyes off the road to see who is calling and take my hands off the wheel to attend the call (in case I decided to), this was a much better experience of attending a call while driving.