Design for the third transportation revolution
The title of this paper is inspired by an interesting article that John Zimmer, the co founder of the popular car sharing service Lyft, has published here on Medium.
I was invited by Strate, a well known design academy in Paris, to organize a workshop on the future of mobility. One of the main focus of Strate is indeed mobility design: Strate’s mobility design students are highly appreciated in France and internationally, and generally hired, after graduation, by car manufactures.
The car industry is undergoing an epochal shift. Technological changes such as self driving cars, autonomous public transports and driverless goods transportation have been already tested and so far demonstrated an excellent reliability.
Electrification of the global vehicle fleet is a reality: it will contribute to better air quality in big cities and, if produced by renewable energy sources, to the global reduction of CO2 emissions.
However, the most promising and fast shifts are taking place in the field of social interactions and the sharing economy. Private companies as Uber, Blablacar, Zipcar, as well as semi-public ventures as Autolib are offering car sharing solutions that are increasingly popular in every big city around the world.
For the new generations, car ownership is less and less appealing. In the USA, 92% of 20 to 24-year-olds had driver’s licenses in 1983, today it’s just 24%.
In the developed countries the quality of life in metropolitan areas is measured by the number of people that are able to avoid the use of private cars for their mobility. In Copenhagen, often referred as a global example for mobility as well as sustainability, half of all citizens commute by bike every day, and the government discourages, with prohibitive taxes, private ownership of cars.
My task for this workshop was double: to sensibilize the students to the new challenges in mobility design and to work with them on new mobility scenarios.
It was quite a challenge: traditional car design is visually captivating and the sketches, 3D renderings and scale models that the students produce in the school are a tangible reward for their conceptual and artistic skills.
On the contrary, service design is, at least in the conceptual phase, abstract. It requires multidisciplinary analytical skills and a good knowledge of the IT processes that will define the service package.
Integrated mobility design impacts so many fields that it is difficult to define a clear focus anymore. Is Uber more about mobility or social interactions? Is it a new paradigm in artificial intelligence? Is it rather a new, potentially dangerous, capitalistic economic actor, or, on the contrary, a huge opportunity for a cleaner planet?
All this interrogations are fully open, and I submitted them to my class in order to give to the students the right ingredients for conceiving innovative scenarios. It was of course not easy for them to be confronted to all this questions: I plunged them into a complex reality, where also professional designers may feel lost.
The projects
I obtained nevertheless good results: some of the projects, although still very embrionary, are worth sharing. The students that designed them demonstrated that is possible to be creative and innovative in the field of new mobility scenarios, bravo! Here a little project’s gallery:
The Polenection project imagines the integration of an holographic pole inside public transports. The pole displays social media content shared by the passengers, that can choose which content they want to make public via a mobile app.
What is particularly interesting is that the pole may also display content visible only by passengers that have chosen a specific topic on their app. For example, if a passenger has chosen video games, he/she will only see video games content shared by other passengers interested in the same topic, while the rest of the travelers will not be exposed to a content they are not interested in.
SwapMe is a urban mobility concept that allows to share personal bicycles as well as proprietary skateboards, scooters and other electrical mobility devices. The devices are stored in docking stations and shared via an app.
ParTout is a smart and well designed app that allows to plan, compare and buy tickets for airplane door to door journeys. The app suggests and calculates the price of the transport to the airport too, which represent often an important hidden cost when traveling with budget airlines. The app suggests all the possible transportation modes to the airport, including the car sharing ones.
Bigorneau is a connected device in the form of a bicycle bell. It can be fixed on the handlebars of every bicycle. The device is linked to an app, and helps cyclists to circulate safely in the city traffic. Bigorneau allows users to signal accidents and other traffic perturbations, the information is then shared in real time to other cyclists via a mobile app.
Conclusion
We are in the middle of a large scale transportation revolution that will have important consequences on almost every aspects of our life: obviously, we have to rethink the way we approach and teach transportation design to the next generations of designers.
I would like to thank Strate design school in Paris, that gave me the opportunity to organize this interesting and fruitful pedagogical experience.
