The Third Space: Future Vehicle Design Is All About The Dwelling Experience
After Howard Shultz launched Starbucks and developed his markety-but-heartfelt presentation style, he came upon a unique way to phrase what Starbucks was, or represented to people in their lives and communities. He called it the “third place” — the place outside of your home and work, where you go to think, to catch up with friends, or to avoid a significant other when it’s too early for a bar.
While there are those who do not like Starbucks or coffee (those people also happen to be wrong), no one is exempt from transportation, and therefore comes into contact with one or a number of “third spaces” that exist between their origin and their destination, be that a private vehicle, shared ride, public transit, etc.
As we step into the next decade, three big shifts are colliding that will steer how companies design how we experience these third spaces:
- Transport and people are becoming more connected and networked together, opening the door to more seamless handoffs between different types of transportation and destinations in the future
- People’s expectation for the level of customization and personalization that their products and services offer continues to ratchet up
- Cars and other transport methods are becoming more automated, and at some probably anticlimactic point will be fully self operating and driving, as some niche examples are today
The earliest signpost of a changing third space experience is, across both public/shared and private transport, we will see increasingly complex but invisible-to-the-user bundling of transport methods. We’re seeing blips of this start to happen with shared scooters and ride hailing. From the same user app, you can book trips in the Lyft app in select cities with both a scooter/bike component for one part and a ride-hail (e.g. Uber, Lyft) for the other, all within the same transaction and digital interface.
That’s a baby step — the least-you-could-do step. But it’s impactful, and users will come to rely on it. Expect to see this trend manifest itself next with car sharing being able to handoff to bike/scooter share. Booking your trip from Brooklyn Heights to Midtown might look different from someone’s trip in Dallas in terms of the transportation methods, but it’ll be the same bundled experience across both. Eventually, if it ever becomes easier to work with governments (which it probably won’t), you’ll see public transit buses and trains be included in this aggregator app experience. There’s a term starting to emerge for this, but it’s mostly public transit focused and dripping with Silicon Valley irony — Mobility as a Service, or MaaS. Whim, a Helsinki-based, public-transit focused MaaS app, has had mixed results due to the typical strains of public-private partnerships, so it remains to be seen how the public MaaS model can succeed.
All of this intermodal handoff stuff gets even more interesting as more of these transport methods are able to do more things themselves without human interaction, creating an even more compelling experience. The ability to book a trip from start to end with mutiple transit methods is cool, but it’s still fully manual. I still have to get on the scooter, drive it, then get off it and get into an Uber/Lyft, etc. Not exactly seamless.
At the same time or closely following the integration among transport methods, we’re likely to start seeing closer integration and handoffs between the transport methods and the origins and destinations. Or to continue the logic, connecting the third-space transport vehicles to the first space — your origin, and your second space — your destination.
It’s a little like how space shuttles works — the ship launches itself from Earth, is itself a dwelling place in orbit, and then becomes a temporary piece of the space station when it docks. I see that as a very real use case in the future — being able to leverage your vehicle as a piece of your dwelling place — but I’ll leave that aside for now. The point is, the bundling of transport methods is only half the story.
One of the only blips of deeper ties between the three spaces that I’ve seen this is Amazon and carmakers teaming up to integrate Alexa into car infotainment centers to control home functions like lights and garages. Someone even gerry-rigged their Alexa Echo to back their Tesla out of the garage. Pretty gimmicky stuff, and I doubt the end play in their minds is a more integrated transport experience, but these examples act as flash-of-the-pan proof that it’s possible.
So, in sum, transportation is becoming Starbucks — the first sign of this shift in transport experience is the bundling of various transport methods, and will eventually become more frictionless intermodal transit as vehicles become more self-operating. And space ships are sweet.
The second hallmark of the evolution of our third spaces occurs on the private vehicle side — and even though this is most applicable to cars, it’s applicable to all forms of private transport, regardless of form factor or propulsion.
As origins, destinations, and the methods that transport us between them become more integrated, the traditionally-clear bifurcation between journey and dwelling place becomes more opaque.
In parallel, this means the line between what we traditionally consider a vehicle and what we consider a dwelling is also less definite. Next chapter we’ll explore how brands and companies are starting to blend designs among the three spaces in an effort to create holistic dwelling experiences.
