Visualizing The Future of Automobility
A number of designers at IDEO have been working hard to understand how our driving habits and transportation as a whole might evolve and change — imagining what’s next for our clients’ products and organizations. The Future of Automobility was a different kind of future-conjuring project — where the desire was to think deeply about the role that automobility might play in our lives in the years and decades to come.
Our goal was less to design the cars of the future than to get people thinking about what it will feel like to live with new forms of mobility. It’s more of an emotional provocation than a logical one. We wanted people to ask themselves, “Would I be cool with having something like this in my city?” That’s a visceral reaction, a gut response, so the future world we presented had to be realistic enough for people to imagine themselves within it.
We needed to create visual assets that make people feel something.
The “gut response” constraint was unique to this project, and successfully generating that response started well before we began creating visuals. We based the design of the concept vehicles on the ways people would interact with them, and we grouped them into three scenarios that reflected daily life: “Slow Becomes Fast,” which explores the ways autonomous vehicles might change our daily commutes, “Inverse Commutes,” which looks at the possibility that our workplaces could become mobile and travel to meet us, and “21st-Century Mule,” which envisions a driverless delivery vehicle named Cody. We began by storyboarding what each scenario would look like, and more importantly, what it would feel like.
For example, I see news about Amazon working toward delivery by drones, but I can’t imagine a future in which drones are flying around carrying packages — I like to see the sky. To me, it’s a much more believable option to use infrastructure that’s already in place, and we have roads that work quite well for delivering goods to people. But how would it really feel to have autonomous vehicles carrying packages around city streets? The same way yellow cabs are part of the iconography of New York City, could delivery vehicles like Cody be part of the iconography of a city? What design details would be required to make that possible?
Approaching Cody from that angle, I realized that it would be weird and ominous to see a delivery vehicle with no driver if you couldn’t see what was going on inside. You’d have no way to interact with it or see what it’s delivering and how it works. That’s why Cody is see-through. I wanted to create a machine that feels nonthreatening and human. You can talk to Cody with natural language — you can email him and he sends you text messages. These small elements give Cody a realistic emotional impact.
Placing the vehicles in the streets of San Francisco was a very deliberate provocation, to imagine the concepts in a context that felt tangible and familiar.
I took 360° photographs to use as environments into which I could render the concept vehicles, and I spent time driving around capturing the lighting changes throughout the day, from early morning to sunset. The time of day when the photos were taken makes a significant difference in how real the site feels.
Of course, none of that would matter if the concept vehicles didn’t look real. In the automotive domain, the standard for concept presentation is already extremely refined. If the resolution is not super high, they look like student projects — that’s just the nature of the space. But we wanted to find out just how far we could push our visualizations. Could we make them photorealistic? Could we achieve cinema quality? From the start, we were looking to explore the limits of what was possible.
The software tools we had at our disposal were critical to the success of the project. To create the CAD models, I used Alias, software that is commonly used in the auto industry to create refined surfaces on vehicles, and Solidworks, which is for smaller, more intricate parts of the models, like the little details on a door handle. But the most impressive tool in my workflow was KeyShot, which I used to render all the images.
Six or seven years ago, I used a giant desktop computer to work on rendering projects like this. I’d have to start it rendering and then leave it overnight, and some of the time it would come out OK, but most of the time I’d come back in the morning to find out that it was crap.
Thankfully, things have changed dramatically. KeyShot renders at much higher resolution in half the time, produces a very professional output, and includes tools for 3D animation as well. It’s super easy to use, so the barrier to entry is low. There are some really high-end commercials out now that I can tell were done in KeyShot, and it’s fantastic to consider that a student can easily use the same software that’s being used by cutting-edge companies.
It made me consider visions of the future that have less to do with cars and more to do with the field of design. Tools like KeyShot, if used wisely and thoughtfully, can help amateurs compete with companies that have many millions to spend. But rather than being a threat to professional designers, I see that as an asset. More people will have a better eye; the baseline of quality will be high, and the high end will be even higher. It’s like the impact that mobile photography has had on photography as a whole — I think the iPhone raises peoples’ overall visual literacy, which creates an opportunity for professionals to use the tools in more sophisticated ways. Pushing the limits of the tools available for concept rendering made me consider what’s next for us in our role as visionaries — it was like seeing the future of seeing the future.
Want to see more of the Future of Automobility? Visit automobility.ideo.com.
