There may be no greater design crime today than putting a touchscreen in an automobile. It's audaciously stupid. The simple fact is that screens demand our eyeballs in a way that knobs, dials, and buttons do not. Choosing the former over the latter means opting for superficial sophistication and whiz-bang appeal over, you know, letting drivers pay attention to what's in front of their 3,000 pound battering ram.

If car companies are going to insist on using touchscreens, though, the least they can do is take a close look at this concept by designer Matthaeus Krenn. It's a simple touch interface that you can operate completely eyes-free.

In Krenn's concept, the touchscreen isn't plotted out into arbitrary menus and buttons. You can touch it anywhere; the various controls depend on how you touch it.

Dragging upwards with two fingers turns up the volume; dragging up with three changes the audio source. Four fingers controls temperature; five for airflow. Each has a unique sensitivity based on its function and can be triggered starting anywhere on the touch surface. Moving up or down with your fingers spread a bit wider offers an additional set of controls. All eight of these can be remapped to the driver's preference.

>Krenn’s solution feels entirely native to the touchscreen.

Granted, it may not be as instantly intuitive as a dial labeled "volume"–real or otherwise. Krenn, formerly a product designer at Cue, a startup snapped up by Apple last year for a reported $40 million, admits as much. "There are a lot of areas where things could be improved, and yes, educating the user about the capabilities of the system is an important one that I did not spend a lot of time on," he says.

Still, it's a smart approach. At its heart, Krenn's concept reflects the greater trend we've been seeing in UI design for touchscreens: a move away from skeuomorphic interfaces. The problem with existing automotive touchscreens is a slavish adherence to the physical buttons that came before them. With no real tactile properties, we have to hunt for these virtual knobs anew every time. Krenn's solution, by contrast, feels entirely native to the touchscreen, and demands much less of drivers as a result.

For his part, Krenn doesn't have a strong preference for buttons or touchscreens in the car. He just insists they be well thought-out. "New controls can open doors for exciting innovation," he says. "But they also come with their new challenges that need to be respected and overcome."

If you've got an iPad, you can try the prototype here.