OUR URBAN FUTURES - move lab

LAB

BERLIN

2019

OUR URBAN THE MOBILITY ISSUE No 1

FUTURES 6

12

27

38

WHAT IS SMALL GOES FAST

INTERVIEW AND DOCUMENTATION

LAB AS A PLATFORM

WHAT IF? – ALTER­ NATIVE FUTURES

Micromobility as the missing link in urban mobility systems.

Everything you ever wanted to know about move lab – and more.

Co creating with our network and how to become part of it.

Creating versions of the future out of responsibility to shape it.

EDITORIAL

2

CONTENT

CONTENT 3

20

31

MOOVEL LAB IS DEAD! LONG LIVE MOVE LAB!

TALKING HEADS

EMBRACING THE ARTIFICIAL

What's going on in the lab?

an interview

by Eileen Mandir & Daniel Schmid

12

24

by the team of move lab

by Markus Kreutzer

2000 YEAR OLD HABITS DIE HARD How collaboration in art and technology keep building the future 5

CHANGING MO­ BILITY BEHAVI­ OUR IN THE 21ST CENTURY

by Don Dahlmann

7

Why everyone should be able to empathize with elusive technologies

by Christohe de Jaeger & Michaela Hannah Zeman

14

WE WORK TO INNOVATE TO WORK TO INNOVATE

THE LAB NETWORK

36

by Gold & Wirtschaftswunder

26

CONFESSIONS OF A RESIDENT RESEARCHER I came, I saw, I resided.

Impressions of my moovel lab residency.

WHAT IS SMALL GOES FAST Micromobility: The missing link in the urban mobility landscape

by Michal Nakashimada

by Michael Szell

by Julia Peglow

SPACE OF IDEAS How to generate impact and influence people in the digital age.

17

28

10

MAKE IT WORK!

WHAT IF?

THE LAB TIMELINE

Turning untamed ideas into experimental products.

Exploring alternative futures with Speculative Design

SEARCHING FOR SMART CITY

by Gold & Wirtschaftswunder

by Florian Porada & Daniel Schmid

by Benedikt Groß & Verena Dauerer

by Raphael Reimann

by Julia Peglow

38

PREFACE

MOOVEL LAB IS DEAD! LONG LIVE MOVE LAB! by the team of move lab

3

MOOVEL LAB IS DEAD! You are probably wondering, why on earth you are holding this newspaper in your hands. We’ll get to that after saying thank you! Thanks for stick­ing around as a colleague, follower, fan or devotee of moovel lab. Maybe you helped us bring one of our ideas to life - thx you’re awesome! Even if you didn’t know about moovel lab a.k.a. move lab before, thanks for taking a peek.

LONG LIVE MOVE LAB!

4

MOOVEL LAB IS DEAD! LONG LIVE MOVE LAB! by the team of move lab

The lab crew with some artefacts of their work

PREFACE

And now the big news: THE MOOVEL LAB IS OVER. From here on out, we will be known as move lab. We’re super excited about this new chapter in the life of this little lab of ours, since we’re joining the mo­ bility joint venture YOUR NOW. In addition to new colors and logos and all, the ­biggest change is that we will no longer be located in the Swabian countryside, but rather smack in the heart of urban life in Germany: Berlin.

MOVE LAB IS HERE. We compiled this newsletter in order to let you know about everything that has been going on over the past four years, and also about what awaits us in the future. We took a moment to step back from our prototypes, scenarios, and experiments relating to the future of mobility, and we reflected on the things that fascinate and inspire us. We in­

PS: You’ve probably noticed the title picture by Marcus Lyon (EXODUS II – DUBAI, UAE 2010). Thankfully this is a montage of the 12 lane Sheikh Zayed Road, which morphed into a 36 lane road with 750 vehicles. “There’s 750 cars on Exodus II, which represents the 750,000 miles I’ll drive as an average person who owns a car. So this way, I can look at the bigger picture.” says Lyon.

We see Lyon’s artwork as a picture of a possible future. A future we should

vited friends and contributors to write about topics that are currently orbiting the mobility universe, about projects that we find exciting, and about where we came from.

You can read articles by Don Dahlmann and Michal Nakashimada on current trends in mobility. Julia Peglow got up close and personal with us, and talked to us about our craziest and most challen­ ging moments to produce a documentary about the lab. Alongside a brief history of interdisciplinary research labs, each one of our members also wrote about their mental home turfs. Daniel Schmid, the current Head of Lab, and Eileen Mandir, the former Head of Lab, interviewed one another, revealing never-before-heard thoughts about the moovel lab in the process. And, of course, we would be nothing without our amazing collaborators, residents, alumni, and friends – which is why we made sure to offer you a glimpse into that network.

Thanks for reading.

Yours move lab Benedikt, Daniel, Florian, Markus and Raphael

YOUR NOW: Smarter cities at the speed of now We’re helping to transform cities by creating mobility apps that combine the most convenient and sustainable mobility options into one platform. As part of Daimler AG and BMW Group’s joint venture, we have unparal­ leled access to a range of services that give riders all the options they need to seam­lessly get from A to B. Book public transport tickets and rides, share cars, scooters, and bikes.

strongly reflect upon, since the numbers that swayed his work actually resemble a bit of today’s reality.

The title picture is part of the Exodus series. It consists of nine images that provoke questions concerning the biggest changes in contemporary society through large-scale representations of the key themes that influence globali­ sation in the modern world.

PUBLISHER MOVE lab

IMPRINT

We hope that this newsletter will inspire all of our readers – from partners, collaborators, and coworkers to our friends and fans – to enjoy and follow the work of our (newly renamed) move lab. We hope you will join us on this new journey.

We’re happy to take you along!

© move lab Alle rechte vorbehalten.

Vervielfäl­tigung insgesamt oder in teilen ist nur zulässig nach vorheriger schrift­licher Zustimmung des move lab.

EDITORS Raphael Reimann (head editor), Diary of the Digital Age (Julia Peglow & Michaela Zeman), Don Dahlmann, Christophe De Jaeger, Florian Porada, Daniel Schmid, Benedikt Groß, Verena Dauerer, Michael Szell, Markus Kreutzer, Michal Nakashimada

GRAPHIC DESIGN Gold & Wirtschaftswunder www.gww-design.de DRUCK Metzger Druck GmbH Obere Au 1, 74847 Obrigheim/Baden Printed in Germany Copies: 300

PHOTOS Title Image: Marcus Lyon – Moovel (P. 6, 8, 8, 26, 27, 33, 38, 39), Erik Witsoe (P. 6), Kai Joachim (P. 7), Julia Peglow (P. 8), studiomakecreate (P. 9), Syed Mahabubul Kader (P. 2), Eyeem / Sorayut (P. 2), SAP (P. 15, 16), Dan Taylor (P. 15), NASA (P. 17), Stephan Eigner (P. 29), Michael Szell (P. 27), Raphael Reimann (P. 19, 21, 22, 23, 32), Christophe de Jaeger (P. 13), Michaela Hannah Zeman (P. 13)

ARTICLE

CHANGING MOBILITY BEHAVIOUR IN THE 21ST CENTURY

by Don Dahlmann

5

CHANGING MOBILITY BEHAVIOUR

2017

One of the greatest challenges of urban life is mobility. You seldomly want to do it and it mostly costs money, resources and nervesabout how techno­logy and the will to change could be used as a tool to undo the mistakes of the past and tackle the challenges of the future. There’s no time to waste, as new technologies are emerging today already.

TL;DR CONGESTION RIDESHARING URBAN JUNGLE OVERLOADED UNCOMPLICATED SUSTAINABLE INTEGRATION

IN THE 21ST CENTURY

ARTICLE

6

CHANGING MOBILITY BEHAVIOUR IN THE 21ST CENTURY

DON DAHLMANN AUTHOR IN THE FIELD OF AUTOMOTIVE & MOBILITY

Don is a successful journalist, writer and PR consultant in the automotive, mobility, motor sports, lifestyle and travel sectors. He is an author for “Gründerszene”, one of the most relevant online magazines for the start-up scene and the digital economy in Germany. Don also operates his own Webzine, “Racingblog” which is the number one in the field of motorsport blogs.

It’s 7:35 a.m. on a Tuesday morning. Stacy checks her e-mails and her schedule for the day. An appointment is pending in the city center. She orders an autonomous smart ED via the moovel app and invites her colleague Andrew to join her. After a few seconds, he confirms the ride. Stacy hasn’t had the luxury of having her own car for some time now, nor has she wanted to. She receives a call via Skype, which she accepts while leaving home. In her shuttle, the infotainment system reco­gnizes the current call and offers to continue it seamlessly via the vehicle’s phone system. The manager places her smartphone in the inductive charging cradle, and the infotainment system takes over and hands it over to the hands-free system. The car’s predictive user experience system recognizes the address of the upcoming appointment and collects her colleague on the way.

as Uber, which offer ridesharing and ride pooling, generate billions in revenue worldwide with their services.

The mobility behavior of people in large cities is undergoing a lasting change.

In light of permanent congestion and a shortage of parking spaces, coupled with constantly rising costs for their own cars, many city dwellers have al­ready decided not to own a car any­more. In addition, many city councils are applying the emergency brake. The already overloaded infrastructure is to be relieved.

Madrid has already closed its old town to cars for some time. Oslo wants to ban all vehicles from the city center from 2019, and Tokyo will only allow autonomous ridesharing services on selected routes by 2020.

Is this scenario a dream of the future?

Not at all. All the technology you need is already here today. Autonomous vehicles already exist in many cities, including Munich and Berlin. The MBUX entertainment system presented by Daimler this year is capable of connecting to a user’s personal digital world. And the Daimler subsidiary mytaxi has been offering ride pooling for quite some time now, where passengers can invite each other to share the travel costs.

When does the future of mobility start?

Autonomous cars, car sharing, rideshar­ ing, ride pooling: these are all new concepts, for some still unknown. But the number of people who already rely on one of these forms of mobility is growing steadily worldwide. In Germany alone, the number of car-sharing users rose from 250,000 to 1.4 million be­ tween 2012 and 2017. Companies such

PROJECT

TRAJEC­ TORIES

❶

Urban centers around the world are pon­dering how they can cope with grow­ing traffic. By 2050, more than 60 percent of the world’s population will live in cities – that’s around five billion ­people. Assuming only one in two people owned their own vehicle, there would be 2.5 billion cars on the road. For the sake of comparison, in Germany, there are about 552 vehicles for every 1,000 inhabitants (as in many other Western countries). In China, despite the enormous boom in the automotive industry in the last 15 years, there are only 118 vehicles per 1,000 inhabitants. It is hard to imagine what would happen if the number of vehicles per capita in China or India were as high as in Europe. It would be impossible to build as many roads as necessary to accommodate them. We need other solutions. But how do you replace one of the most convenient mobility solutions that has existed so far?

The answer? By making the future of

mobility even more convenient. Autonomous cars that drive independently from door to door are just one part of the entire mobility chain; integrating all possible mobility providers is the next step. The monoculture that exists today, 90 percent of which consists of privately owned cars, will be a mix of different offers in the future. These will include modern public transportation as well as car sharing, ridesharing, ride pooling, electric scooters, electric pedal scooters, cycling, and walking. But how can these services be combined and how can the different needs of millions of city dwellers be catered for?

The answer is mobility platforms that bundle and account for the whole mobility range. Instead of having to navigate through the urban jungle with numerous apps, one app handles the daily queries.

Instead of getting into their car, users provide a destination address. The app searches for the fastest, most convenient, or cheapest mobility mix and takes care of booking and billing. One of these providers, moovel (becoming REACH NOW), is pursuing this approach. Mobility should be uncomplicated and fast, with­out the user having to worry too much.

When thinking about the revolution of future mobility, the moovel lab has a unique approach that combines empathy for the needs of urban citizens with a hands-on mentality. Of course, it asks fundamental questions like “What are key factors of the future of urban mobility? How do we have to change our behavior to get there? How can technology help us with that?” But the lab also shows how to answer some of these questions right now – i.e. by using technology we already have or by intel­ ligently utilizing the possibilities ­of data that is relatively easy to collect.

The ultimate aspiration is that new mobility be affordable, fast, sustainable, reliable, and available to all people regardless of social background and across all continents. One of the greatest challenges of the twenty-first ­century is enabling the world’s growing pop­u­lation to move anywhere in the world without harming the environment. moovel is contributing significantly to this.

Every day, millions of people write spatial stories. This media installation uses real mobility data provided by our moovel mobility app to make these spatial stories visible by printing an urban landscape picture of wax.

Read more about the idea behind our project: lab.moovel.com/projects/trajectories People involved: Benedikt Gross, Raphael Reimann, Tilman Haeuser, Eileen Mandir, nui lab, Bjørn Karmann, Marco Berends, Christoph Hermle

ARTICLE

7

SPACE OF IDEAS

by Julia Peglow

SPACE OF IDEAS What was your idea behind turning cars into unicorns? Why would you c ­ are to count all parking spaces of Los Angeles? How did you manage to survive in a start up, let alone corporate start up? Questions over questions lead to a wholesome picture of what move lab has done so far, why it is important and how they did it.

TL;DR

move lab at work

WAX STRUGGLE NARRATIVE UNICORN PROFESSOR FUTURE MOBILITY POP OWNERSHIP INSPIRING

HOW TO GENERATE IMPACT AND INFLUENCE PEOPLE IN THE DIGITAL AGE.

ARTICLE

8

SPACE OF IDEAS

“One hour before the board’s sign-off, one of the nozzles broke and all the red wax flowed onto the table,” laughs Raphael. “That was the point when I ­really started sweating. Mending, gluing, taping – nothing worked. But in the end, I managed it somehow.” Just in time – a little later, Dieter Zetsche came over ­curiously to visit the gigantic wax printer apparatus.

The lab presented an impactful media installation to the Daimler Annual ­General Meeting: the “TRAJECTORIES” project, a mechanical arm with several wax nozzles drawing the traces of urban mobility on a table measuring two by two meters in size, creating an image of a city that is as poetic as it is real. The data for the exhibit is taken from the moovel app, used by urban travelers to look up how to get from A to B in the city – by public transportation, shared mobility, or taxi.

JULIA PEGLOW BRAND CONSULTANT & WRITER

Julia studied visual design and worked for branding agencies in London, Berlin and Munich as strategic consultant and managing director. After two decades she left the agency world to become an independent creative consultant for founders and entrepreneurs, as well as a keynote speaker, free thinker and writer, which can be followed on her blog “diary of the digital age”.

Digital-real mobility landscapes Raphael is the urban philosopher in the lab’s antidisciplinary core team; an ori­ginal lab member, he is a studied geographer and the team’s self-confessed “city nerd.” “TRAJECTORIES is one of my favorite projects,” he says. “One of our inspirations for this project was a story from New York trilogies. by Paul Auster. It is about a detective who chases someone and over time realizes that this person is drawing huge letters

by walking through the city. The wax printer also has a similarly creative com­ ponent: it visualizes the traces that people leave in the city.” Here lies the direct link to moovel (becomes REACH NOW), the company in charge of bundling up (Daimler’s) mobility services – all invisible services based on data that are transformed into three-dimensional landscapes and imperishable paths

by TRAJECTORIES. “If you let the wax printer run for a while, the places that are particularly important for urban mobility become increasingly clear. The highest pile of wax is the main station,” Raphael enthuses. The project received a lot of attention, toured from Frankfurter Buchmesse to the Daimler Annual General Meeting and on to the TEDx Talks, and found its way into everyone’s living rooms as part of a piece by the Tagesschau.

Hardware Prototyping and Reality Checks As philosophical as this may sound, in the real world, the guys from the lab often have to struggle with the adversities of hardware and reality checks.

“TRAJECTORIES was definitely our most unreliable project. Things were always going wrong.” It’s odd that Raphael puts it that way – because trial and error, experimentation, and rapid prototyping are the lab’s own way of working. After the team had built the first exhibit prototype with nose-drop pipettes, the nui lab in Schorndorf constructed the first real wax prototype ­ with the help of aluminum profiles, motors, hardware, and control software.

Currently, the wax pattern is drip­ped using a current data set from Munich, which shows a month’s worth of mobi­ lity data. Visualizing real-time data would be relatively easy too – the table would simply need an Internet connection.

from cars to unicorns: beat the traffic

Inspiring the individual – And the CEO

PROJECT

BEAT THE TRAFFIC X ❷

Dieter Zetsche himself came to the ­ wax table as part of the board approval process too, surrounded by a whole bunch of important industry figures.

Raphael recounts how the CEO looked at the device with a bit of a clueless expression on his face, asking curiously what it was all about. “The whole in­ stallation automatically attracted the attention of these die-hard motorists simply because it was different from all the cars standing around,” he concludes.

TRAJECTORIES grabs the viewer with its haptic and narrative components.

“People were standing in front of it in

rows, saying nothing, just staring at the printing robot as if hypnotized,” says Raphael. Even with the CEO, it worked.

The topics before, during, and after the automobile age Move lab is sometimes reminiscent of a playground, of a free spirits’ stronghold. And yet this location exists within a corporate structure. It’s not surprising that the corporate world reacts to the projects and the impact of the lab with astonishment; worlds collide here.

“In any case, launching Beat the Traf­fi c X was the first time in history that a unicorn made it onto the Daimler AG web­ site,” says Michael Kuhn with a grin.

The Chief Communications Officer is responsible for press relations and all mobility issues at moovel (becomes REACH NOW). He’s used to the free spirits by now. What’s more: “The lab’s projects enrich our story and change the way we are perceived. They help us to break down purely automotive topics and reach completely different target groups and audiences.” Yet there were also conflicts – the unicorn, for example.

Traffic jams, traffic and Candy Crush Beat the Traffic X is a browser game where you click on cars that then magic­ ally turn into other things: unicorns, trees, and rainbows. You can select different cities and land at the busiest intersections in Tokyo, Moscow, Barcelona, Buenos Aires, Berlin, London, or Los Angeles.

The idea for the project did not arise strategically, but in a typical lab way, from several lines of thought. “We stood on our balcony on the eighth floor and looked down at Hauptstätter Strasse, one of the main arteries in Stuttgart,” says Benedikt, founding member of the lab and code-savvy design professor, describing his way of seeing and thinking. The inner-city traffic junction connects a federal road, several bus lines, a light rail line, and the rack railway depot. “We had an idea to do something with this scenic view.” At the beginning, we asked some very simple questions: How many cars pass by here? Can we count the green and red?

These initial thoughts were then joined by new technological developments: the open data cam, an open-source platform for detecting objects in urban

The AI based Mini Game is a magical way of using traffic data to face current challenges of urban mobility. Players can enchant traffic jams worldwide and turn them into nicer things like unicorns, rainbows and driving trees.

Get ready to play on: selfdriving.moovellab.com People involved: Benedikt Groß, Markus Kreutzer, Thibault Durant, Raphael Reimann

9

SPACE OF IDEAS

Future Mobility Pop and the Simpsons Benedikt and Raphael call their way of telling their stories light-footedly and humorously – in Lab language “semi-­ popular-scientifically” – “future mobility pop”. Benedikt explains: “At some point we realized that our projects were a bit like the Simpsons. You can just look at the colorful pictures. Or delve into the deeper meaning, the political and socie­tal context,” explains Benedikt. In Beat the Traffic X, the approach was to play­fully get as broad an audience as possible to deal with the topic of traffic – by clicking on cars to make them disappear.

However, this idea did not meet with enthusiasm everywhere in the corporation.

A first beta version of the game leaked, where a crosshair was used to shoot at cars that then dissolved into smoke clouds with a plop sound. The lab team then had to answer fundamental questions in an internal meeting. “So, you’re developing a game where players shoot cars? ... You do know that you still work for a car company?” In response, the team protested, “Well, we don’t destroy them, we transform them into more beautiful things!” But of course, move lab has also benefited from the developments in the automotive group in recent years. Sharing concepts that are no longer based on the owner­ship model are be­ coming socially acceptable. moovel (becoming REACH NOW) now has over five million users, with an even bigger impact after merging into Daimler and BMW’s joint venture. This is another reason why it is possible for the lab to exist with­in a corporation.

The prerequisite for the lab’s freedom of thought is that it is not subject to any compulsion to provide innovative product development based on the logic of a product portfolio. However, this freedom is by no means a given; according to a recent capital study on innovation labs, they are still booming (in Germany, there were about 100 digital innovation units in 2017, with a forecast of 300 to 600 such units by 2020), but they are very often “misused” for in­cremental innova­ tions, i.e. for the further development of existing products, although this is usually not in line with the targets. These tend instead to be aimed at generating cultural

change in the enterprise and improving the image of the enterprise to the outside.

Internal validation through external success

“I don’t think the lab was properly under­ stood at the beginning,” Benedikt says.

“It was because of the attention of the outer world that we were given more leeway and confidence. It’s like, ‘There’s gotta be something there.’” The lab has won several awards for its work, including the German Design Award, and received many invitations to conferences and exhibitions. The projects have been published in various national and international media, including Spiegel Online, Süddeutsche Zeitung, Gizmodo, Wired, Fast Company, Republicca, BBC, Dis­covery Channel, Fortune, and CreativeApplications.Net.

Mobility in a box The lab provokes a wide range of react­ ions with its topics. Generating the greatest possible impact with the broadest possible audience is a goal that is built into the projects from the very beginning, so to speak. There have also been drastic reactions, especially in social media. For example, the moovel box caused a lot of excitement and emotional reaction. Even though, as so often in the lab, it all started with a very innocuous question: Can the potential of logistics be transferred to mobility?

For quite some time, this question had been the main thread in the lab, featuring, among other things, in a drone taxi project that received a lot of attention.

Speculative design workshops that the lab did at the university revealed that people in public transportation miss their privacy – and were quite open to the thought experiment of traveling in a private cabin. The initial spark for the idea, however, was the creative collabo­ ration with David Leonard, media designer and artist. “David told us that he made it to art college because he sent himself in a box,” recalls Benedikt. ­Together with the design innovation ­studios Takram and Studio Makecreate, the moovel box was created: a closed, standardized box in which one or more people could send themselves from A to B, a service you could book by app.

produced in cooperation with BuzzFeed. ­However, the lab team could never have counted on the variety and emotion of the reactions. The moovel box post was liked over 1,500 times and shared over 2,500 times, and it received nearly 700 comments, ranging from enthusiastic to absolutely horrified. In this way, the project achieved exactly what the lab is all about: creating a social discourse and changing each individual’s view on mobility.

Move lab published a hoax video on Facebook. The video showed the service as if it was already in use and calling for beta users. It was launched and

For more urban philosophy read Paul Austers's The New York Triology or Kevin Lynch's Image of the City

making of: moovel box - actually being shipped.

settings, and YOLO (“You Only Look Once”), an open-source object detection algorithm that can classify objects in pictures. But how do you build an application out of it that inspires the general public beyond the nerd scene?

trajectories: tech art surrounded by cars at Daimler's general meeting 2016

ARTICLE

Search for YOLO at lab.moovel.com or see waht else we made with this awesome library

learn more about moovel box at box.moovellab.com

INFO

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LAB TIMELINE

THE LAB TIMELINE 2014

2016

Moovel lab was founded

MOOVELGO V1

CODE CAMP

MOOVEL BOX

2014 / 10 / 15

2014 / 11 / 03

2016 / 01 / 12

2016 / 09 / 12

INESS DESIGN WORKSHOP @ HSG ST. GALLEN

2015

2016 / 03 / 01

TRAJECTORIES @ DAIMLER AG HAUPTVERSAMMLUNG 2016 2016 / 04 / 06

MOOVELGO V2

GREENSKIN

2015 / 01 / 15

2015 / 11 / 16

MOBILITY FUTURE SPECULATIVE WORKSHOP @ KÖLN INTERNATIO­ NAL SCHOOL OF DESIGN (KISD)

2016 / 05 / 30

HUMAN DRONE TAXI

ROADS TO ROME

2015 / 04 / 01

2015 / 11 / 25

SPECULATIVE FUTURE MOBILITY WORKSHOP @ HFG SCHWÄBISCH GMÜND 2015 / 04 / 06

CITY AS A SERVICE WORKSHOP

Roads to Rome receives Special Mention @ German Design Award 2017 2016 / 10 / 01

PAPER PRESENTATION @ IEEE VIS 2016 2016 / 10 / 01

Roads to Rome receives Honorable Mention @ Fastcodesign Innovation

By Design Awards 2016 2016 / 10 / 15

TRAJECTORIES

TRAJECTORIES + WHERE DO CARS GO AT NIGHT @ ARTS+ 2016 of the Frankfurt Book Fair

2016 / 06 / 06 2016 / 10 / 23

TEAMCHATVIZ

Roads to Rome wins Silver @ Kantar Information is Beautiful Awards 2016

2016 / 07 / 19 2016 / 11 / 03

2015 / 09 / 28

BILITY INSIGHTS FOR BARBIE WORKSHOP @ HFK BREMEN

HI THERE! @ HACK YOUR CITY STUTTGART

2016 / 08 / 03

2015 / 10 / 22

MOBILITY INSIGHTS FOR BARBIE 2016 / 08 / 03

WHRE DO CARS GO AT NIGHT? 2016 / 11 / 07

INFO

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LAB TIMELINE

PROJECTS TALKS / WORKSHOPS EVENT / EXHIBITION AWARDS

At move lab we try to be as open and inclusive as possible when it comes to sharing our work. From this point forward, we’re happy to contribute to a new timeline, namely the one of move lab. We are more than proud to share the highlights of just more than 4 years of working at the moovel lab in this timeline.

2017

Starting out with getting our hands dirty in 2015 it’s wonderful to see how our output diversified and our contributions to the discussion around the future of mobility flourished. To stay up to speed with our future timeline follow us on Twitter. For more details on each record visit our website: move-lab.com.

2018

BYE BYE FORMAL – NEW THINKING BY DESIGN @ AED DESIGNERS PUNCH STUTTGART

GTFS EDTR

TURE SCENARIOS – STRATEGY WORKSHOP @ MOOVEL

2017 / 01 / 17

2017 / 08 / 31

2018 / 01 / 08

Nomination Ars Electronica STARTS Prize 2018 + Exhibition @ ARS ELECTRONICA, Linz 2018 / 06 / 01

DESIGN THINKING WORKSHOP WITH J. PAUL NEELEY @ MOOVEL

2017 / 02 / 17

FUTURE OF MOBILITY @ D.CON­ FESTIVAL, HASSO-PLATTNERINSTITUT, POTSDAM

FUTURE LIVING – N°2 AUTOMATED CITY @ TRIENNALE DI MILANO

2017 / 09 / 14

2018 / 02 / 23

2018 / 06 / 14

moovel Go @ 4YFN Barcelona

2017 / 03 / 01

Roads to Rome is a Jury Selection 20th Japan Media Arts Festival

Where Do Cars Go at Night? is a German Design Award Winner 2018

WHO WANTS TO BE A SELF-DRIVING CAR?

2017 / 06 / 21

DESIGNING HOPE @ NODE17, SYMPOSIUM – THE HOPE OF TECHNOLOGY 2017 / 06 / 30

2017 / 03 / 18

MOBILITY T.B.D. @ LEICHTBAU IM URBANEN SYSTEM – MOBILITÄT IN DER GEBAUTEN UMWELT 2017 / 07 / 13

2018 / 03 / 09

Roads to Rome @ Art of Networks III Exhibition, Network Science Institute, Northeastern University, Boston

2018 / 03 / 07

Who Wants to Be a Self-Driving Car? @ Daimler Fachtagung zu Autonomes Fahren, Recht und Ethik

FLIGHTS TO ROME 2018 / 06 / 27

OPENDATACAM WORKSHOP @ WEMAKETHE.CITY AMSTERDAM 2018 / 08 / 28

2016 / 09 / 26

BEAT THE TRAFFIC X 2018 / 04 / 04

What the Street!? winner of Art & Advocacy @ City Vis 2018

2018 / 10 / 23

2017 / 10 / 20

Who Wants to be a Self-Driving Car? @ Kikk Festival 2017

2017 / 11 / 01 Who Wants to be a Self-Driving Car? @ NODE17 Forum for Digital Art

Who Wants to be a Self-Driving Car? @ SXSW

2017 / 09 / 19

2017 / 03 / 18

THE MOBILITY SPACE REPORT: WHAT THE STREET?!

MOBILITY T.B.D. @ HOCHSCHULE FÜR TECHNIK STUTTGART SS2018

AT THE STREET!? @ NORTH AMERICAN CARTOGRAPHIC INFORMATION SOCIETY (NACIS) MONTRÉAL

OPEN DATA CAM 2018 / 04 / 20

AUTOS ZU EINHÖRNERN @ RE:PUBLICA 2018 2018 / 05 / 02

2017 / 11 / 10

SPECULATIVE FUTURE MOBILITY @ ROYAL COLLEGE OF ART 2017 / 11 / 21

GUEST TUTOR: MOBILITY++ WORKSHOP @ DOMUS ACADEMY 2018 / 06 / 11

Beat the Traffic X wins Special Mention @ German Design Award 2019 2018 / 10 / 20

2019 MOVE LAB

ARTICLE

12

HISTORICAL PARTNERS IN CRIME

by Christophe de jaeger & Michaela hannah Zeman

2000 YEAR OLD HABITS DIE HARD Interdisciplinary research labs are so 9th century. And yet everybody’s still ­doing it – from pioneering to restaging to research and development. ­Paradigm shifts don’t happen overnight, and they generally don’t happen when you’re all the way down the rabbit hole. But they do happen when ­ you start thinking outside of your discipline’s box. At least according to ­curator and professor Christophe de Jaeger and writer Michaela Zeman.

TL;DR ANTIDISCIPLINARY 2000YRS LATER COLLABORATIVE WISDOM TECH-ART FRUITFUL BAUHAUS

HOW COLLABORATION IN ART AND TECHNOLOGY KEEP BUILDING THE FUTURE

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HISTORICAL PARTNERS IN CRIME

“Information technology will lead to a new industrial revolution.” Professors Behringer and Bergmann from the ZKM Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe (or “Electronic Bauhaus”) arrived at this view before the general public would use the Internet and before Tim Berners-­ Lee and Robert Cailliau developed the World Wide Web in 1991.In times when we are waking up to change every day, the ability to picture the ­future and find solutions to build a world worth living in is important – now more than ever. But the collaborative practice of art and tech­ nology is not an invention of the twenty-first century. It dates far back in time.

The House of wisdom – New creations for god and humanity Interdisciplinary labs are not just an idea everybody is talking about right now.

The history of collaborative practice between art and science is age-old – take for instance the House of Wisdom, founded in the ninth century by Caliph Harun al-Rashid in Baghdad. He gathered poets, astrologers, doctors, mathematicians, philosophers, and artists from the Byzantine Empire, India, and Persia to practice freedom of thought and to bring new creations to the world. As a result, he figured, humanity would be able to evolve and live a dignified life – and god would be pleased.

Being a library, atelier, translation center, and research institute, the House of Wisdom attracted brains from far and wide for more than two centuries – and its collected knowledge also had a ­crucial impact on Europe’s scientific and intellectual progress.

Bauhaus – Improving living con­ ditions in the city Nearly 2,000 years later, wondering about human life and searching for solutions to improve it, though from a more secular point of view, was still a matter for cross-thinking networks.

What is the ultimate meaning of life?

What significance should be attributed to newly built environments, their ­aes­thetic qualities, and the people living in them? These were key questions that, resulting from the industrial revolution, drove the famous Staatliches Bauhaus, founded in 1919 by Walter Gropius, Hannes Meyer, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. The Bauhaus radically broke down the boundaries between crafts and fine art and fundamentally changed the perspective on how artists could contribute to finding solutions relevant to society.

With its interdisciplinary laboratory approach, the Bauhaus had a major im­pact on art, architecture, and the design of urban living spaces, especially in Western Europe and the United States.

MIT – Commercial value and the new lab culture From the 1960s and 1970s onward, par­ ticularly in the United States, the phenomenon of artist groups with cross­over interests in science and technology led to a new kind of collaboration be­tween artists and specialists from the emerging field of computer science. At first, this computer art was not commercial – but then it began to influence commercial developments. Companies started to realize the huge potential in this type of collaboration and kept coming back to look for interesting ideas they could develop for the market.

CHRISTOPHE DE JAEGER

MICHAELA HANNAH ZEMAN

RESEARCHER, CURATOR

BRAND CONSULTANT & WRITER

Christophe is responsible for the programme of media arts and the relation between arts and industry in the Center for Fine Arts. On a freelance basis he curated exhibitions in Belgium and abroad (USA, China) with international media artists.

In 2014 he founded the Belgian organization Gluon that stimulates creative partnerships between artists, researchers and industrialists.

Michaela studied German language and literature and art history. Always on the lookout for new topics to delve into, she enjoys writing about electromobility as much as about the philosophy of things or linking art and life. After stages in publishing houses and design agencies she decided to take a path away from fixed structures as a consultant and writer for “diary of the digital age”.

In 1985, Nicholas Negroponte finally founded the MIT Media Lab, which shaped an unprecedented model for unrestricted corporate sponsored research.

The MIT Media Lab’s approach and dictum was: “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” Fittingly, it was a place focused more on science than scholarship – and it produced demonstrations and prototypes in the domains of digital publishing, humanmachine interfaces, advanced television, spatial imaging, computer music, animation, and computer graphics.

The lab continues to cultivate an antidisciplinary culture and create disruptive fringe technologies. It is supported by more than 80 members whose businesses range from electronics to entertainment, fashion to health care, and toys to telecommunications.

Today: Building the future with tech-art At the end of this high-speed run through time and history, it’s safe to say that open-minded interdisciplinary work has been extremely fruitful throughout the history of mankind. It can create radical change – and plays a vital role in times of change. Today, in 2018, the new industrial revolution once predic­ted by the ZKM has long become our reality. We live in a world that is not only exciting and full of possibilities, but ­also confusing and frightening. Solutions are in demand. But to find them, we need not only global corporations and tech people who want to invent the future.

We also need free spirits who dare to ask the questions and to follow their vision.

Labs are still a place where scientists and dreamers and technology and art can come together to build our future.

To plan your German-wide Bauhaus journey visit bauhaus100.com/travel

Do you want to hear a great talk about why we need more tech art?

Google Bruce Sterling SXSW 2018

1978

Broadcast & Motion Picture Industry

Print & Publishing Industry

Computer Industry

2000

Broadcast & Motion Picture Industry

Print & Publishing Industry

Computer Industry

With these diagrams Negroponte made the case of the creation of a Meda Laboratory at MIT

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WE WORK TO INNOVATE TO WORK TO INNOVATE

by Julia Peglow

WE WORK TO INNOVATE When small companies evolve into global players, it often feels like they lose something along the way. It’s not really clear what is lost, exactly, but it seems like you can find it in working environments such as the SAP Innovation Center, SPACE10 – IKEA’s design-centered research lab –, various Google teams from Garage to X to Zoo Innovation Lab, or the Nokia Bell Labs, which were founded by AT&T in 1925. Julia Peglow talked with Martin Wezowski, Chief Designer and Futurist at SAP, about what it’s like to work in one of these environments peopled with tinkerers, free-thinkers and result-driven problem-solvers.

TL;DR SAP FUTURIST PUNK ROCKER SOON THREE HORIZONS TOOTHBRUSH MOONSHOT INNOVATION MAP

TO WORK TO INNOVATE

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WE WORK TO INNOVATE TO WORK TO INNOVATE

Working at SAP's innovation campus in Potsdam

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MARTIN WEZOWSKI CHIEF DESIGNER AT SAP

Martin Wezowski works as Chief Designer and Futurist for SAP’s Innovation Center Network & Chief Innovation Office. He moved across a range of disciplines from UX, to systemic design to define innovation visions and strategies. Right now, he is on the mission to map, build and inspire a future we want to live in.

The mechanics of change and the philosophy of innovation These days, it’s easy to get the impression that there’s a new innovation lab popping up out of thin air every two minutes.

According to a 2017 study by Infront and Capital on the rapid expansion of digital innovation labs entitled “Companies on the trail of start-ups – How established companies use innovation labs, accelerators and incubators as an instrument of digital transformation”, we are indeed experiencing an innovation lab boom: there are already 100 digital innovation units in Germany right now, that number is expected to grow to between 300 and 600 by 2020. According to the same study, only 30 percent of innovations labs are actually delivering truly disruptive inno­vations. The impact of all these innovation labs seems to be happening on a different level: 59 percent are considered to be contributing to culturalchange, and 70 percent to image improvement.

And yet, we have to ask: What are the guys in these labs actually doing? How can they help move established companies forward? And how can tinkerers, free-thinkers, and result-driven problemsolvers work together productively?

Back to the roots: SAP shifts its focus to its processes SAP is one of the companies that has found answers to these questions. The software giant has successively built up its SAP Innovation Center Network and developed its very own co-working method for corporates and creatives since 2013.

When former punk rocker Martin Wezowski, now Chief Designer and Futurist at SAP’s Chief Innovation Office, describes his job, you wonder what a normal working day looks like for him.

Wezowski and his team at the SAP

Innovation Center, who have earned the nickname “the third horizon guys”, spend their days working on a reality that is still many years in the future.

SAP was founded in 1972. At that time, agile processes were a matter of course in this small company. “We coded a lot of our software on-site at the customer’s workplace, and thus developed products that were tailored to the customer’s needs right from the start,” says Wezowski. As the company grew in the 1980s and 1990s, its processes became less flexible due to its sheer size. According to Wezowski, this did not go unnoticed: “We realized: hey, we lost something along the way and we need to get it back.” Since the turn of the millennium, SAP has once again turned its full attention to its processes.

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ATTENTION PLEASE

Design thinking in day-to-day business At the SAP Innovation Center Network, design and innovation are closely linked.

More than 550 software engineers, business developers, designers, strategic consultants, and futurists work at twelve locations that include Potsdam, Walldorf, St. Gallen, Bangalore, and Palo Alto. Thanks to SAP’s close ties to the Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam, design thinking is deeply anchored in the company. “To consciously think things through from the process stages and design them accordingly – that’s our approach to design,” Wezowski explains. “That’s why we don’t differentiate between designers and software engineers. Whoever develops also designs. With this approach, you can essentially design everything: from a political system all the way down to a toothbrush.” According to Wezowski, every process begins with an idea, followed by experimentation and prototypes. He also believes that in 10 years, computers will be better able to calculate and engineer ergonomics, while humans will be the ones who design relationships.

16

“The spectrum of possibilities is so wide – never in human history has the present been so temporary. Soon we will reach a point when innovation finally becomes the standard method,” says Martin enthusiastically. The second horizon fits in between the other two: this is where the Innovation Center Network teams and the SAP Group’s product development teams collaborate with specialists in SAP’s various industry solutions, and with customers who are closely involved in the development process – a structure similar to the SAP of the 1970s, when it was invented.

“When we started the three horizons approach, there were quite literally two worlds of thought colliding. People were skeptical,” Wezowski remembers.

“But today, it’s starting to gain acceptance for sure.”

A three-horizon co-working concept But how does SAP implement these design thinking processes in everything the company does? SAP Innovation Network’s unique concept is based on an innovation map with three horizons: The first horizon is the on the corporate level – it’s driven by efficient day-to-­ day business and focused on plannable, repeatable, and scalable results. The third horizon, also called “moonshot”, is the area where Wezowski and his “third horizon guys” operate. They create scenarios that are decades in the future, and analyze the mechanics of change:

INNOVATION WILL BECOME THE STANDARD WORKING METHOD.

BY MARTIN

Open seats to invent the future at SAP's innovation campus

QUOTE

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17

MAKE IT WORK

by Florian Porada & Daniel Schmid

MAKE IT WORK! Breaking things is one part, learning from it is the other part. But don’t do the mistake of being afraid of either! At move lab we try to create new product experiences by looking at the fringes of how our products work. Then it’s all about testing, building and testing and building and …

TL;DR

Liftoff. We have a liftoff.

PRODUCT LEAN LAZINESS WIREFRAME FEEDBACK API HYBRID LAUNCH

TURNING UNTAMED IDEAS INTO EXPERIMENTAL PRODUCTS.

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MAKE IT WORK

QUOTE

FAKE IT TIL YOU MAKE IT.

BY FLO You have a great idea for a product or service – at least that’s what you think.

Wouldn’t it be great to be sure and get real feedback from customers before you actually start to invest a lot of creative energy and money?

raced across re:publica in Berlin talking to around 20 people – the first opinions started to evolve … and eventually ­oppose ours, leading us to work on some initial improvements.

That’s what MVP is about: “The Mini­ mum Viable Product (MVP) is the version of a product which enables the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort.” The term was coined and defined by Frank Robinson and popularized by Steve Blank and Eric Ries in the book The Lean Startup: How Constant Innovation Creates Radically Successful Businesses (September 2011).

Going from scraps to…

When we are ideating and testing new product ideas in the lab, we really love to use some of the principles from lean start-up methodologies, and that includes the MVP approach. So, once we get hooked onto an idea, our lab process looks like this:

Jumping onto the idea

API An API is a bit like a restaurant.

You tell the waiter what you’d like to eat.

The waiter lets the kitchen know and ideally comes back with your order – simple as that.

The menu is the capability of the API: you can’t order sushi if it’s not listed on the menu.

The kitchen is the server that pro­vides all the ingredients for the dishes. Finally, the waiter is the interface that you give all the requests to.

With this in mind, we set up our product explorations with a view to learning from and measuring the actual result against our expectations to prove or ­disprove our assumptions. Our first step involves defining our core customer segment and forming our value proposition (how much better our solution is compared to the solutions that exist today). We began this based on the following assumption: given the growing number of mobility services (Uber, Lyft, public transportation, etc.), people just want to push one button to get out of a certain place. They don’t care which service it is – the assumption is that this is just a detail nobody really cares about.

There might be some truth in the saying that laziness is the driver for innovation, but by rephrasing this statement, we can create a user-centered concept that maximizes convenience. At this stage, we randomly asked people for some initial feedback on our idea and concept – doing this at events where people are not totally unfamiliar with the concept of validating ideas helps. We

From low-fidelity to high-fidelity to working in the real world.

Coming back with homework from these discussions, we created wireframes to draft how the service could look and what the core functions should be. This normally manifests in wireframes and low-fidelity designs – basically the skeleton of the app. It’s still a sketch for now, something that can be adjusted quickly, something that isn’t pixelperfect and gives a conceptual overview of how the user flow works. At this point, the idea is just a guiding compass to give us direction; the path comes after.

Fake it before you make it – that’s probably the best description of what click dummies are. During the sophistication of prototypes is where we finally test how an app actually looks and how people interact with it. Using screenshots of designs and pasting them together with a piece of software allows for an app experience without having to write a single line of code.

The challenge is not necessarily to build the smallest product imaginable; we simply want to find the fastest way to get through the build-measure-learn feedback loop with a minimum amount of

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MAKE IT WORK

… nothing less than the key to mobility.

FLORIAN PORADA CREATIVE DEVELOPER

Florian is the connecting piece be­ tween concept and implementation: he writes code and builds stuff at the moovel lab. After studying at Media University in Stuttgart and Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences, technology became his gateway to explore new ways of solving problems. Florian creates digital and physical prototypes that spark interest and create ideas in other people's heads.

effort. This stage is where a concept is far enough along that real users ­with­out any knowledge can test it for another round of adjustments. We worked together with Fraunhofer’s JOSEPHS, a café that has different product scenarios instead of coffee-­table books for visitors to experience and give feedback on.

Learning to fly Being part of a bigger company, we have the opportunity to look into services and frameworks that are developed inhouse as well as the freedom to explore new frameworks, services, or techno­ logies that appear around the web. Why build an API that gives you information about nearby transit stops when it’s just three desks away? This sometimes feels like building a new picture from an existing jigsaw puzzle.

Finding and combining those different technical puzzle pieces allows us to find the leanest possible way of developing the perfect solution. Once we have all the pieces together, we can see which pieces have the potential to contribute to our bigger picture. Take our transit screen moovel go, for example. It was built using not only recycled technical components like the transit-­stop API (mentioned above), but also reusing design elements found in our apps to create a completely new product experience, thus allowing a new entry point into the moovel ecosystem.

the hybrid applica­tion approach (which runs on both plat­forms, Android and iOS, without looking too shabby) help us to streamline the tech stacks of our different projects.

Seeing our app prototypes actually create some traction is the stuff of our dreams, so, imagine being on the front page of Hacker News and your servers go up in smoke ...This is where our scalable environment actually has us covered.

Pushing last-minute fixes is no problem with a Continuous Development, Continuous Integration Pipeline – a bot that keeps an eye out for code changes and deploys them to the running app. It also ramps up new machines if necessary.

Container Container: Think of a container as a fish tank, where the program code is a fish. The fish could survive both in the sea and the tank.

The difference is that you can define what the fish tank should look like and where it fits best, in the kitchen or in the living room – with the sea, not so much.

By now, all the puzzle pieces should have come together to create a beautiful new app. Although not all of these experiments end in viable products or additional features, we’re just about to launch one of our latest explorations soon.

Gottago is a single interaction app that gets you out and about just by opening it. With the Bluetooth key chain we built, you don’t even need to get out your phone to book any of moovel’s (becomes REACH NOW) mobility services.

LEAN PROCESS IDEAS

LEARN BUILD

Ready to complete the puzzle Technically speaking, the alterations and improvements never end, but at some point, you’ve got to get your ideas together and start coding. Remember the lean approach we’ve been following so far? Of course, this also includes actually coding the app. Our development ­environment consists of flexible that are also capable of adapting to a larger workload. In particular, we’ve learned that container based services and

CODE DATA

cool user research initiative by Fraunhofer in Nürnberg. Google for JOSPEHS - customer research

MEASURE

INTERVIEW

20

TALKING HEADS

by Eileen Mandir & Daniel Schmid

TALKING TL;DR

FIGHT SUBMARINE FANTASTIC TANGIBLE SELF-DETERMINED ARTEFACT ABSURD MERGER

HEADS

Who better to tell you about the future of the lab than the one person who has to vouch for it in front of the Board of Management? And who bet ter to tell you about its origins than the woman who­se brainchild the moovel lab was? Daniel Schmid (current Head of Lab) and Eileen Mandir (former Head of Lab) got together to talk about things readers of this paper would be interested in.

Their conversation has been carefully preserved,

pre­pared, and printed for your enjoyment. Some of the topics touched upon include thecircumstan­ ces under which the lab was founded, how the lab vibe was created, and how the whole thing is ­embedded within the company structure. This one­ on ­one discussion happened in Stuttgart at the start of October 2018 and felt like a catch­up between two old friends ...

INTERVIEW

21

TALKING HEADS

by Eileen Mandir & Daniel Schmid

DANNY What motivated you to fight for an innovation and exploration lab within an already very future-oriented company back when the moovel lab was created?

EILEEN The idea to found a lab came to me four years ago, after I had been with moovel for about two years. The company had grown rapidly at that time and had noticeable growing pains. With about five business models, we were almost a plodding medium-sized company, ­including all our suppliers, while mentally and structurally still being at the very beginning. So we needed something that would quickly generate content and create authentic visions and ideas associated with our products.

While the company learned about the complexity of a mo­bility platform, the lab was an attempt to seize the intiative, which I had worked out together with Benedikt. Thanks to his “thinking through making” approach, the lab was able to fill this communicative vacuum very quickly. So at that time, every­­thing was quite easy to fit in.

DANNY Now that you describe it, I’m surprised that the lab was so lean. Why not start with 25 people?

EILEEN That’s true, in a corporate entity like Daimler, that’s rather small, even by today’s standards, and certainly not in terms of impact, but in terms of staffing and budget. There were two major reasons for this: on the one hand, there was really high pressure in product development – in this kind of situation, it’s hard to put 25 people into a think tank. If I hadn’t integrated it in the company, there would have been three or more managers who would have joined the discussion. They say you should choose your battles, that was my premise, and management’s response was “Hmm, interesting idea ... If you believe in it, OK. But please do both, we want you to be the Head of Product and Lab”.

On the other hand, I didn’t want to create the same paralyzing situation that the rest of the company was struggling with.

There were probably more managers than makers who didn’t know where their budget was being used most effec-

skills come by themselves, the things you didn’t know you’d learn – that’s often how it went.

DANNY You have been pursuing a different career path for a few years now. How do you perceive the lab looking from the outside in? Do you feel things have changed a lot?

ANSWER

WE ARE TWISTING PEOPLE'S BRAINS TO RETHINK MOBILITY IN THEIR OWN WAY. I CAN'T QUANTIFY OUR IMPACT. I DON'T NEED TO. I KNOW IT IS TREMENDOUS.

BY EILEEN tively, given all the outstanding issues and open tickets, so I wanted to start small, accept restrictions as a catalyst for creativity, and then see what would happen.

Looking back now, I think we got it just right, otherwise we would never have enjoyed this great freedom to just tinker with things and try out new approaches.

DANIEL SCHMID HEAD OF LAB

Daniel likes creating innovative ideas for future web-based products and services. He brings a lot of experience to moovel lab after being head of moovel product ­design and founding CEO at 47Nord. Daniel is an internet entrepreneur, and has created award-winning internet business models in the main focus area of eCommerce, mobile services and web-based software products.

DANNY So you laid the cornerstones. What would have been the dream start? Which goals and challenges were you confronted with at the time?

EILEEN All of that was a little unclear, except for one thing: we had to produce content.

The purpose of this content was to paint a picture of the moovel brand, establish ourselves as an attractive employer, and position ourselves in the industry as people with something to say and products in the pipeline!

Another aim was to ensure that the lab would be linked to product development both methodically and in terms of content. More creative methods were to be used in product management in order to prioritize features in a more

user-centric way, but I couldn’t exactly observe whether or not these efforts were successful.

The cultural impact was a third, very important aspect, and one crucial to rebuilding the company. The lab has ­always been very good at showing what happens when you just do it. In many cases, this has had an effect on the entire company.

DANNY I’m interested in how you actually chose the core members. What was the key factor for you when it came to selecting the lab members?

EILEEN We didn’t draw up job positions and fill them with the help of recruiters. It was always clear to me that we needed people who could actually create some­ thing, but at the beginning, it was much more important to me to bring people together who could twist my mind a little, people who could see connections in the world that I didn’t. Some conversations still haunt me ­today – in a positive sense, of course! It’s exchanges like these that change the way you think – that’s exactly the kind of people you need, not any one specific skill. The

EILEEN At first glance, the whole thing has become more professional. From the outside, of course, I can only judge it through what I see in the media. I notice that the product communication has been ramped up. I was once asked at a conference: “OK, I understand what the lab does, but what exactly is moovel?”

Now, however, the two are more closely associated. I also note that the lab benefits from a really good reputation within the industry because it promotes mobility in the wider public. The aha moment that the lab generates with its projects is the first step toward reflecting on people’s strongly habi­tualized traffic behavior. This is the only way to trigger change – something that is very important with respect to transportation politics.

DANNY Which aspects of your time with the lab do you channel into your consulting work?

EILEEN Certainly a lot of the findings are impor­ tant for my clients in the field of organizational design. I always recommend starting small or using the “submarine approach.” The lab’s generally open ­approach to communications helps a lot.

The fact that there’s transparency with regard to the alumni and the network helps everyone. This applies both to people who were once involved and the lab itself, which shines together with its collaborators.

DANNY One last question: Are you satisfied with what you have seen so far? Do you agree with the work being pursued or would you have pulled the emergency brake at some point?

EILEEN I’m happy every time a new project is released and, in most cases, I’m really impressed and think: oh how cool that I’ve been part of this fantastic creative group. One thing that I have noticed – if I had to pick one thing – is that the projects are becoming more and more sophisticated. Of course, the bar is rising and you learn with every project, but still I think it’s really important that you stay authentic and keep doing things in a way that inspires you.

22

TALKING HEADS

by Eileen Mandir & Daniel Schmid

Eileen and Daniel contemplating about each others approach to lead moovel lab.

INTERVIEW

EILEEN The only question that remains for me is whether it’s easier or harder to get a project out than it was three years ago.

Have you ever thought about entering another metalevel, such as talking about technology or sustainability? Will you run out of ideas at some point?

DANNY I think our work already involves metaand macrothinking. The previous projects already cover a very wide range of topics. At the same time, however, it’s becoming harder and harder to find uncharted territory – although I’m sure we’re not going to run out of ideas.

The broad range of subjects covered by each individual means that we can certainly associate much more topics with mobility than if we were all purely transportation researchers.

new direction. The lab wasn’t as heavily involved in these rebuilding activities, which gave us space to deal with ourselves and professionalize ourselves even more. We tried to structure our own work better and position ourselves in a way that would allow us to function relatively self-sufficiently.

EILEEN So you didn’t get caught up searching for yourselves, you already knew who you were and forged ahead.

DANNY I like to think that, deep down, we know how we are and what we want to stand for. Fortunately, we have been able to continue along our path and pursue more success in our field. Of course, we are happy about all the success we have achieved with our known approaches, but what is more exciting is how we can transfer these learnings to other thematic areas. This way, we can solidify our own identity while at the same time developing new topics and initiatives.

EILEEN Do you think the lab has rubbed off on other parts of the company with this self-confidence?

DANNY Of course, what pleases us the most is when we hear from new moovel employees that the lab is one of the reasons why they chose to work for moovel.

Generally speaking, I believe that many of our colleagues hold us in great respect, especially those who know our history and appreciate what we have been able to achieve with such a small team. At the same time, we try to be as open and inclusive as possible, but unfortunately, our work generally ranks below the company’s usual day-to-day business. That’s why I believe that the core moovel team still has enormous potential that is yet to be unlocked. This is certainly an opportunity that we will continue to pursue.

EILEEN You were founder and head of your own digital agency before your time with moovel. To what extent is the lab different from an agency?

DANNY Sure, there are interesting parallels and differences. I think that both constructs absolutely depend on motivated, talented people. This team hunger and enthusiasm go a long way toward explaining the

EILEEN Coming back to your start with the lab, when a new team boss takes over, they usually want to change something. Was that the case for you?

DANNY It really helped that I had known the lab since its early days; having closely observed the different stages of devel­ opment, I knew which successful tracks already existed. It was important to figure out how I could further develop existing paths, but also how I could complement new ones in the best possible way. So my goal was to bring my experience in creating digital products to the lab, thus bringing the whole thing closer to the core of the company.

EILEEN What did you introduce in these product explorations?

DR. EILEEN MANDIR FORMER HEAD OF LAB

Eileen is a traffic expert exploring the intersections of human behavior and mobility patterns. After her studies, she joined Daimler AG as a mobility specialist, where she quickly committed to bringing moovel to the next level. After being responsible for the development of the intermodal routing, she became head of product. She also founded and managed the innovation laboratory moovel lab.

ANSWER

EILEEN At the time when you took over, the moovel lab was greatly expanding its product portfolio. There was a lot of exploration and growth going on on the product side. How did you find your place there?

I BELIEVE THAT A LAB IS A SMALL ENTITY THAT IS OPERATED WITH A VERY HIGH LEVEL OF EXPERTISE THAT IS SEPARATED FROM DAY-TO-DAY BU­ SINESS

DANNY Back then, I noticed that a large part of the company was being steered in a

BY DANIEL

DANNY There were great starting points and prototypes that clearly came more from the product perspective, such as the transit display system moovel Go. That’s where I started to bring in more product-related approaches, to ensure that we didn’t produce tech storytelling content and nothing else. This gave ­us a bit of a contextual shift, but one that is very close to my heart. I see this not only as bringing added value but also as an important portfolio extension.

INTERVIEW

23

TALKING HEADS

by Eileen Mandir & Daniel Schmid

genuinely amazing results that we have achieved. What is different is that, as an agency, you have a much harder time, firstly, recruiting people and, secondly, keeping them because of the high economic pressure. In a corporate lab, this economic pressure is somewhat removed. However, the need to produce strong results is still there – which inevitably leads to management expectations.

Another similarity is the project work, which involves juggling many topics at the same time. Fortunately, we have much more freedom when it comes to choosing the topics in the lab. We also enjoy less dependency and time pressure compared to an agency.

EILEEN Would you say that the term lab has influenced your work and perception?

Would using a different name have made things clearer initially?

EILEEN Well, the lab is also known for its special vibe. Could you try to describe it?

Maybe with a story you’ll still be telling each other in 10 years?

DANNY I would say that we are all very good friends and that this creates a mutual trust, which is why we really enjoy ­working together. In other words, the vibe in the lab is very personal! Not all teams would deliberately go on a business trip into a hostel with bunk beds and endure each other’s snoring. This, coupled with the outstanding talents that each individual brings, is certainly one of the

ANSWER

SOME CON­ VERSATIONS STILL HAUNT ME — IN A VERY POSITIVE SENSE.

BY EILEEN secrets of success. I believe that this is a rare combination that would be hard to replicate. If you were to ask me how to create a vibe like this, I’d say it’s important to combine different types of personality. A good approach is to mix introverted and extroverted people; you simply need this to keep a well-balanced social structure.

Another cornerstone of this vibe is a mutual enthusiasm for similar things. We all like similar obscure music or do the same niche sports, for example. After all, if you’re not extremely enthusiastic about absurd ideas at work, you’re not going to bring new things to life. Especially not if there are no blueprints, a foregone conclusion when it comes to innovation.

EILEEN Was it important to have a mixture of women and men represented in the lab?

DANNY This is a very important topic, not only girls and boys, but diversity itself. It definitely helps that we – and this applies to moovel as a company too – are very international. Diverse views must be intrinsically embedded in the projects and products. Colleagues with different cultural backgrounds can only be an advantage for all of us. Designing a pro­duct with different cultural contexts

Always time for a next time.

DANNY The question is what the alternative would have been. I believe that a lab is associated with a small entity that is run with a very high level of expertise and that is separate from day-to-day business. Labs try to deal with new ­topics that have not yet been developed or validated. That’s why I think the term lab is the most appropriate.

Our approach differs from classical research in that, at the end of the day, the product is not a theoretical research paper, but tangible and experienceable things, where the project documentation is the medium that allows for discussion, which by the way can also be the product.

So if you look at our portfolio, from speculative design with artifacts from a possible future to product prototypes that are already working today, you can see that we cover a wide time span from now into the future.

implied, some of which are more demanding, results in solutions that work universally on the broadest basis. Therefore, we should continue to do every­ thing we can to optimize for diversity.

EILEEN Last question: What’s the lab going to do after the merger?

DANNY (smiles and rolls his eyes) I’m afraid I can’t comment on that ...

EILEEN All I’m asking is what readers want to know.

DANNY All right, all right ... the fact that this interview is even being printed here ­means that the lab isn’t going anywhere!

Of course, we’re delighted that we get to keep this responsibility as part of this larger construct, since we really enjoy what we do. Then again, the cards are being reshuffled and new hands are being dealt, so we’ll have the opportunity to redefine the scope of our work.

Going forward, I can imagine that we will cover an even broader spectrum. All in all, we are definitely looking forward to Berlin and meeting our new colleagues there ...

INFO

24

THE LAB NETWORK

THE LAB NETWORK Nui Lab Studio Nand Shiori Clark Diary of the Digital Age Andreas Ruff J Paul Neely Daniel Schmid Head of Lab

Benedikt Groß Director of Design

Raphael Reimann Content & Media Lead

Florian Porada Creative Developer

Markus Kreutzer Design Technologist

Josephine Hartung Joey Lee Eileen Mandir Alex Markov Ayser Armiti Jan Asmus Raphael Dirr Marco Berends

WE OFFER MANY DIFFE­ RENT FORMATS FOR COLLA­ BORATION.

INFO

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THE LAB NETWORK

We offer many different formats for collaboration. Our residency program uses a more intensive working approach. Internships and student jobs offer a taste of the lab world. We maintain close links with universities by hosting workshops incorporated in the curriculum. We also have a great network of collaborators with whom we realize our projects.

Whatever the format, what matters to

COLLABORATORS ALUMNI MEMBERS

us is working together at eye level and establishing an approach where all those involved can trust in one another’s expertise, giving them the confidence to take risks and discover innovative approaches. Ultimately, everybody wants to be proud of the out­come while giving credit where it’s due!

Niklas Roy Thibault Durand Gold & Wirtschaftswunder Sven Beiker Susanne Purucker Wolfgang Gruel Hfg Schwäbisch Gmünd Meso Digital Interiors Raphael Zimmermann

Stephan Bogner Tilman Häuser Michael Szell Flore de Crombrugghe Philipp Schmitt Bjørn Karmann Julius Breitenstein Neele Rittmeister

Tobias Lauer Christoph Hermle Verenea Dauerer Anagrama Olivier Brückner University of ST Thorsten Heilig David Leonard Studio Makecreate BJP PLaner Thomas Thöne Robert Tinnefeld Olkeksii Rudenko HFK Bremen

ARTICLE

26

CONFESSIONS OF A RESIDENT RESEARHCER

by Michael Szell

CONFESSI­ ONS OF A RESIDENT RESEARCHER The move lab residency program was created to foster exchange b ­ etween disciplines and ways of thinking. Bridging between science, art, technology and more. It’s a unique chance to slip into the lab team for a defined time frame. We love it! And apparently our former residents also share our opinion ...

TL;DR WAX STRUGGLE NARRATIVE UNICORN PROFESSOR FUTURE MOBILITY POP OWNERSHIP INSPIRING

I CAME, I SAW, I RESIDED. IMPRESSIONS OF MY MOVE LAB RESIDENCY.

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27

CONFESSIONS OF A RESIDENT RESEARHCER

and impactful project. In this time, we devi­ated considerably from my initial project proposal; a flexibility that I cherished greatly. The further development process wasn’t exactly linear either. For example, after several weeks of work, we had to throw away most of our web code and start from scratch. Bene ­quickly realized we needed help and ­hired an external professional to give us a hand. This might have been stressful for the more faint of heart, but I loved the extreme flexibility and positivity that finally, after some months(!) of delays, allowed us to complete and launch our “What the Street!?” project.

MICHAEL SZELL AUTHOR

Michael is assistant professor at Central European University, Department of Network and Data Science. His interdisciplinary background of Physics, Mathematics and Computer Science is reflected in his research goals: To quantitatively understand collective behavior and the underlying patterns of our interlinked actions and decisions. And more generally: To understand urban and online environments.

I was researcher in residence at the moovel lab, Stuttgart, from September to December 2016. Although this time was short, the residency was one of the best times in my life both from a professional development and from a having-fun-with-awesome-people-­ abroad point of view. Here’s why.

When Benedikt Gross, the move lab’s director of design and a previous collaborator from MIT, encouraged me to apply to the residency program, I knew this was an opportunity I couldn’t miss. Not fully aware what I was getting myself into, I trusted Bene, applied with a short project proposal, discussed it online with lab members, and a few weeks later, I was on a plane to Stuttgart!

The smoothness of the work environment at the moovel lab was mind-blow­ ing, especially coming from academia.

Having been used to Kafkaesque levels of bureaucracy, this was the exact ­opposite: I immediately got my computer, onboarding was finished within a few hours, and I was set to start. ­Together with my highest-caliber residency partner Stephan Bogner, who was carefully selected to complement my data-wrangling skills, I was provided with a team of web and UX designers and creatives, several coordinators to support us with administrative tasks, no constraints on resources (I seriously never saw a single number – we were simply given the resources or workforce whenever needed), and unlimited freedom to come up with and develop an idea on the topic of urban mobility.

I cannot stress enough how important this freedom was. Our project’s brainstorming phase lasted for a good six weeks – enough time to tinker with the latest design methods and coding techniques and get up to date with the mobility literature so as to understand how we could implement a unique

PROJECT

WHAT THE STREET?! ❸

The impact of our project was major on several levels. First, we were covered by top media outlets such as Fast Com­pany, which saw it reach a wide audi­ ence. Second, our project was so unique that we earned an excellent ­reputation within both moovel (becomes REACH NOW) and Daimler, despite being critical of cars. Third, the move lab and myself significantly strengthened our connections in 1) the graphic design community and 2) in the mobility research/ urban planning community as What the Street!? led to a follow-up research project published in Urban Planning.

that having learned about and used their methods in a team setting, such as affinity diagrams or highly iterative design, has allowed me to greatly improve my project development skills and apply these in other settings, such as research and software development.

In addition to all that, I was also really happy about getting the chance to share my know-how from the network analysis of taxi sharing from my previous research at MIT and the way this could actually influence the mobility concepts moovel (becomes REACH NOW) is working on.

All in all, being “in residence” at the moovel lab has substantially broadened my horizons, skills, and industry/­ community connections, in turn making me a better researcher. It is an experience I can recommend to anybody who likes to dynamically explore uncharted terri­tories with a wonderful and creative team.

From a professional point of view, I have probably never learned so much in such a short time. Working more closely with designers than ever before, I was blown away by their fast-paced style. I feel

How to become a resident The move lab residency is a 3- to 4-month program that offers makers/researchers/creatives/ tech­nologists the opportunity to develop projects and ideas on the future of urban mobility. If you’re interested, you can submit your project or apply through the “call-for-applicants” process. The program will provide you with an environment to make projects tangible. ­We want to get together with independent and moti­vated doers. To join this ride, you need a collabo­rative and self-disciplined working style along with an openminded and culturally sensitive attitude. If you can see yourself working in this hands-on environment and have the necessary hard skills, get in touch!

How much space does mobility need? Equipped with recently developed techniques in data visualization, we set out to explore urban mobility space to answer our questions systematically, interactively and above all, in a fun way.

Dive deeper into our Mobility Space Report whatthestreet.moovellab.com People involved: Michael Szell, Stephan Bogner, Benedikt Groß, Thibault Durand, Anagrama

ARTICLE

WHAT IF?

by Benedikt Groß & Verena Dauerer

WHAT IF?

28

Digging into the ancient ruins of Egypt taught us quite a bit about how the first societies worked. Because we can deduce from what they left behind.

So why don’t we dig into the ruins of the future? Speculative Design helps us to create and understand how possible future scenarios might look like and function. By creating ‘artefacts of the future’ we are able to learn about these futures by deducing from what might just become the next big thing.

TL;DR

Will robots raise our kids?

CRITICAL WÜNSCHENSWERT DESIGN FICTION RESPONSIBILITY ILLUSTRATE BEYOND EINSTEIN IMAGINE

EXPLORING ALTERNATIVE FUTURES WITH SPECULATIVE DESIGN

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WHAT IF?

FUTURE CONE TIME NOW

PREPOSTEROUS!  "won't ever happen" POSSIBLE  "might happen"

POTENITIAL

PLAUSIBLE  "could happen"

THE PROJECTED FUTURE  "business as usual"

POTENITIAL

Everything beyond the present moment

PROBABLE  "likley to happen"

PREFERABLE  "should happen"

‘... it has become easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism’ – Fredric Jameson

BENEDIKT GROSS

Since the further development of critical design at the end of the 1990s, two disciplines, namely speculative design and design fiction, have been investing themselves in future visions. The genre of design speculation was coined by no other than pioneers Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby, dedicating their book ‘Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction and Social Dreaming’ (MIT Press, 2013) to the topic.

[A]

[B]

affirmative problem solving design as process provides answers in the service of industry for how the world is science fiction futures fictional functions chnage the world to suit us narratives of production anti-art research for design applications design for production fun concept design consumer user training makes us buy innovation ergonomics

critical problem finding design as medium asks questions in the service of society for how the worlda could be social fiction parallel worlds functional fictions change us to suit the world narratives of consumption applied art research through design implications design for debate satire conceptual design citizen person education makes us think provocation rhetoric

spective, slaves to industry, using d ­ esign processes to simply fulfill the very near­term ends. In this scenario, we change the world to suit us, whereas “B” stands for the complete opposite. It wants us to change to suit the world. Here, we apply design methods to raise new questions and uncover problems. We design for debate and preferable alter­ natives and not just for near-term goals.

‘Where do cars go at night?’

DIRECTOR OF DESIGN

Benedikt is a speculative and computational designer. His work deals with a fascination in the relationships between people, their data, technology and environments. He is co-author of "Generative Design", one of the top-selling books on computation design. Benedikt exhibited and published his work widely and is also a professor of Interaction Design at HfG Schwäbisch Gmünd.

What if? Speculative design works on concepts that might, at first glimpse, sound rather unusual. However it is not at all about predicting a future, rather it emphasises on creating alternatives.

When trying to imagine how our presence will evolve, it often aims to create “preferable” possibilities (“wünschenswert” in German) or the opposite to illustrate and critique sinister futures. It might feel way over the top, but it enables potential for a future we can prepare for by today. And we do this by designing “artefacts” from the future.

Do we really want this to happen?

VERENA DAUERER

But don’t be confused, speculative ­design is quite similar to a normal design process – with one catch. It doesn’t necessarily aim to be market-driven. Instead, it asks, “Do we really want this to happen?

Is this really a preferable future?” It, too, wants to create new insights and opportunities and help us uncover problems. In a corporate environment, it can reveal dead ends, speed up the decision-making process, and inform new strategies. When it comes to organi­ zations, it opens up a space to discuss 5 to 10 years of possible futures within.

‘We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.’

– Albert Einstein Speculative design is exactly what we, the moovel lab, do with our research.

As an antidisciplinary creative space, we thrive on constantly changing our perspective and thinking freely. With our projects, we want to generate discussion, make mobility a bit more tangible, and inspire change and debate about public responsibility. But above all, we ask questions: “Where Do Cars Go at Night?”, for example, is a project with which we explored how self-driving cars will change mobility as we know it. What will self-driving vehicles do when we sleep? How will our kids be educated about this? Our approach was an artifact from the future, a children’s book that tackles these topics.

How self-driving vehicles will change

Verena is a freelance technology editor and copywriter in Berlin and Tokyo and works at the interface of technology and creation. She thinks digital technologies such as VR, Bitcoin or responsive spaces can enrich our everyday lives – or not. But they are always exciting.

‘… [to design for] the complex, troubled people we are, rather than the easily satisfied consumers and users we are supposed to be.’

– Anthony Dunne Dunne and Raby tried to explain specu­ lative design with a manifesto “that ­positions what [they] do in relation to how most people understand design”.

Their A/B Manifesto opposes the t­ ypical design approaches and how design normally operates in the industry. “A” stands for everything that makes us consumers or, from a professional per-

Experience a future at the Museum of Future Government Services in Dubai

DESIGN JOURNALIST AND EDITOR

mobility is becoming a hot topic within the mobility sector. It’s just a matter of time, which is why we want to break down the expert discussion and bring it to a level that everybody can relate to. The idea behind making a children’s book was to open up this discussion by simplifying this complex topic, because, for most people, self-driving vehicles are still a thing of the future. “Where Do Cars Go at Night?” is also intended as a means of illustrating what we can expect from this technology.

Social media dystopia in augmented reality Speculative design is also an instigator of social critique and consumerism. ­London-based designer Keiichi Matsuda created a clip about an augmented reality experience in which the female protagonist is being capitalized on her own time and spending power through gamification. Hyper-Reality is a kind of surveillance dystopia with the urban ­environment turned into a game interface saturated with advertisement.

A bug in the code leaves the female shopper without a digital identity and leads her to an existential crisis. Matsuda explains: “If my films have become more critical, it is because I see a grow­ ing risk that technology will leave us exposed. We have the tools to build an amazing future, but we can only get there if we understand and challenge the present.”

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WHAT IF?

Speculative design studio Superflux, together with interdisciplinary studio ­ Tellart, research center Fabrica, research practice Near Future Laboratory, and Institute for the Future, designed a future vision for the United Arab ­Emirates prime minister’s office: the Museum of Future Government Services featured probable scenarios including artifacts. The exhibition was developed as an immersive experience and imagined, among other things, the future of border control. At immigration, staff greeted the travelers like hotel guests, presenting a wet wipe for refreshment, which was later examined for viruses.

Visitors then walked along a hallway while being scanned for weapons and running through identity checks. Matt Cottam, the founder of Tellart, wants people to engage with technologies before they are even a reality. “The important thing is that people get expo­ sed to feasible future scenarios and start to think about how decisions we make today about technology will have downstream implications. That they can preemptively start thinking about policy for things that are pre-legal, because they just don’t exist yet or are emerging.”

Raising robotic natives Cross-disciplinary German designer and researcher Philipp Schmitt, currently studying at the New School, New York, wants future generations to prepare for technologies before they even enter our daily life. For his project “Raising Robotic Natives” (with Stephan Bogner and Jonas Voigt), he built artifacts for generations growing up with robots.

His aim was to explore interactions between children and robots that could raise them as the first generation of robotic natives, asking himself: “Why do future visions of robotics incite discomfort in our generation? Could robots truly render us obsolete or is it our fear of losing control? And are these fears conditioned or instinctive?” He imagined a young generation of kids being socialized with technology from an early stage. How­ever, unlike us, these robotic natives will have a different, more positive opinion about robots thanks to his artifacts. He designed a Living Room Kill Switch for example, a robot tool head posing as a baby feeder or a cute dragon costume to disguise an industrial robot.

PROJECT

WHERE DO CARS GO AT NIGHT? ❹

ust a bit more obtrusive please. Hyperreal by Keiichi Matsuda

Reconstructing the ­future of border control

The Internet of Things seen through an IKEA catalogue How daily things can look completely different when seen from an alternative perspective is an ongoing project at design and research practice Near ­Future Laboratory, as demonstrated with its Ikea Catalog from the Near ­Future, produced in collaboration with the Swedish Mobile Life VINN Excellence Centre and designed by Boris Design Studio. The practice was interested in how a possible future of the Internet of Things (IoT) could be shaping our living room. Using design fiction, the Ikea catalog with very special furniture came to life. They say: “We used the catalog ­ as a design fiction artifact for its compelling ways to represent normal, ordinary, everyday life in many parts of the world … It is not a specification, ­ nor is it an aspiration or prediction. The work the catalog does – like all design fictions – is to encourage conversations about the kinds of near futures we’d prefer, even if that requires us to represent near futures we fear.”

“Corporate” Speculative Design All these projects go far beyond the usual revenue-driven developments. But why not? Even more so with speculative design, as design methods aren’t against “the industry” per se. Their critique is aimed at shortsighted corpo­ rations investing with only the next six months in mind and concerned with nothing more than quick satisfaction for shareholders. Instead there should be an interest in long-term goals and sustainable solutions.

The future is here already, that is why corporate research can benefit greatly.

search web for Hyper real nearfutureLab IKEA

How will self-driving cars change mobility as we know it? What will self-driving vehicles do when we sleep? How will our kids be educated about this? This book is an approach to explain these questions.

Read more about the genesis of our book and its main charakter “CARLA-15” lab.moovel.com/projects/where-do-cars-go-at-night People involved: Benedikt Groß, Raphael Reimann, Tilman Haeuser, Shiori Clark, Susanne Purucker, Wolfgang Gruel, HfG Schwäbisch Gmünd, J. Paul Neely

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31

EMBRACING THE ARTIFICAL

by Markus Kreutzer

EMBRACING THE ARTIFICIAL The way we interact with the latest digital technology has evolved far beyond reproducing a single function at the push of a button. Nowadays, keyboards know what words we want to type before we finish tapping out the third letter, while digital assistants are able to suggest which movies we might be in the mood for. Markus Kreutzer, design technologist and humanist, explains how artificially created systems grow neural networks outside of our control.

We will require new ways of thinking in order to build these networks, and new methods of perception in order to understand these systems.

TL;DR SOCIETY SCIENCE COLUMBUS SCARY ETHICAL INCLUSION RELATIONSHIP TRUST

WHY EVERYONE SHOULD BE ABLE TO EMPATHIZE WITH ELUSIVE TECHNOLOGIES

ARTICLE

google Moral Machine to start up MIT’s Moral Machine. Also, don't miss the evaluation of the data they collected.

Back in 1990, Carl Sagan, the American astronomer, cosmologist, and astrophysicist, said, “We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology.” Since then, technology has advanced tremendously. Indeed, nearly everyone is confronted with machine intelligence nowadays, whether through music or movie recommen­dation services, purchase predictions, or virtual assistants. Artificial intelligence is everywhere and pervades our lives.

The Fear of the New and Unknown Throughout history, humans have always been scared of the new and unknown.

When Christopher Columbus, the Italian explorer, navigator, and colonist, started sailing across the Atlantic Ocean, people were afraid he would sail right off the end of the earth. This anxiety came about for an obvious reason: humans usually like to be able to foresee potential dangers and consequences. Because of this fear, it’s not surprising that the rapid development of emerging technologies is terrifying to most people.

In fact, machine intelligence and automation are often seen as public enemy number one. According to a survey by the American Automobile Association (AAA), more than 75% of Americans are scared of the idea of traveling in a car that is navigated autonomously.

The “In- Between Process” The rapid growth of emerging techno­ logies is leading to a lack of technological literacy, and as technology becomes more and more complex, our ability to understand it is fading more and more.

Imagine you open Google’s image search, you type “bird” into the search field, then something happens and you get images of birds. Totally normal! But, in actual fact, for most of us, something magically happens ­between typing “bird” and seeing images

PROJECT

WHO WANTS TO BE A SELFDRVING CAR? ❺

32

EMBRACING THE ARTIFICAL

of birds. It is this “in-between process” that is so confusing, because we understand neither the algorithms nor the system behind it.

But it’s machine intelligence in self-­ driving cars that really scares us. After all, we are entrusting our lives to these “in-between processes.” MITs “Moral Machine” project opened up an ­interesting discussion in the wider public with regard to the challenges of artificial intelligence in the self-driving car. A variety of complex scenarios allows you to empathize with the brain of the car by experiencing the moral dilemmas with which self-driving cars might be faced on our streets.

MARKUS KREUTZER DESIGN TECHNOLOGIST

Markus is a design researcher, technologist and strategist. He works collaboratively across disciplines focusing on future concepts, services, products and experiences for present-time debates, choices and strategies. With an interest for humanities he investigates the o ­ pportunities andfor unintended google consequences of emerging technologies in the twenty-first century. “moral machine”

Techno­logical Concerns Clearly, technology is continuing to ­advance at an unforeseen pace. Futu­ ristic ideas that were once inconceivable are now part of our everyday lives. If you compare the state of development just 15 years ago with today’s access to and usage of information technology, it’s insane and even ridiculous to think of everything that has happened in the past decade and how digitalization has influenced our lives.

It’s quite clear that this transformation isn’t over and we will be confronted with huge challenges regarding the rapid growth of the knowledge gap between those who are technologically literate and those who aren’t. Even today, it’s becoming more and more difficult for most people to keep following the latest technological trends and releases. How can we make sure that people across all social layers, ages, and areas of interest don’t lose access to fundamental services and products only available digitally?

This unconventional driving machine we built provides is a data driven, immersive trust exercise that uses augmented reality and object recognition to help people empathize with self-driving vehicle systems.

Join our conversation about autonomous driving beatthetraffic.moovellab.com People involved: Benedikt Groß, Raphael Reimann, Joey Lee, David Leonard, meso Digital Interiors GmbH

33

EMBRACING THE ARTIFICAL

see the world through the eyes of a self-driving car.

ARTICLE

We need more empathic Empathy is a Tool experiences and educa- Empathetic experiences can be used to tional platforms build trust between humans and techOne way to deal with the technological concern could be the inclusion of empathetic experiences in existing and emerging digital products. For example, when we design autonomous systems, we need to design experiences where users feel comfortable, have control over the system, and get inside knowledge through transparency while using it. This would guarantee a better understanding, as well as foster trust in autonomous machines, which would in turn improve the user’s well-being.

Another approach could be to educate and inspire debates through the creation of educational platforms. These platforms can be used as a basis for encouraging discussion, like move lab’s “Who Wants to Be a Self-Driving Car?” project. This project is an unconventional driving machine that uses augmented reality to help people empathize with self-­driving vehicle systems – a trust exercise that aims to open up new perspectives on the future through the creation of a platform that inspires debates about increasingly complex and more intelligent transportation systems.

Of particular interest is the technical feasibility and viability and questions around how the many layers of our lives will be affected by machine intelligence.

nology, especially for people who often have no access to domain-specific contexts. With this in mind, empathy could be seen as a tool for decreasing the increasing knowledge gap, there­ fore guaranteeing access to fundamental services and products and enlarging companies’ user bases. Designers need to design for everyone, be aware of the knowledge gap, and build the most comfortable, controlled, and transparent user experiences, especially in times when we are entrusting our lives to “in-between processes.”

Elusive technologies and machine intel­ligence are going to play an ever-greater role in our lives, so everyone should have the chance to establish an empa­ thetic relationship with the technologies they’re using. Because once we can embrace the artificial, we can start trusting the systems we live with, create technological literacy, tackle the technological concerns, and start discussing ethical questions.

THE MORAL MACHINE

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36

ATTENTION PLEASE

WHAT IS SMALL GOES FAST Due to regulations e­scooters had a bit of a late start on Germany’s streets.

Investments have been made and partnerships signed. And as expected the scooters started rolling just in time for summer. Municipalities have been watching developments closely and hope to have the right answers to avoid a micro mobility wild west happening in German cities. Critics are on the rise, but is there actually a mobility gap to fill?

TL;DR HUNDREDS CHRISTENSEN LITHIUM ION SCOOTERS ACQUIRE VANDALISM EXPLODES REVOLUTION

MICROMOBILITY: THE MISSING LINK IN THE URBAN MOBILITY LANDSCAPE?

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37

ATTENTION PLEASE

QUOTE

CITIES LIKE SANTA MONICA HAVEN’T SEEN SUCH DISRUPTION ON OUR STREETS SINCE HENRY FORD FLOODED THEM WITH MODEL T’S AND SCARED THE HORSES. SANTA MONICA CITY COUNCIL, JUNE 2018

In September 2017, a small start-up quietly distributed 10 stand-up electric scooters around Santa Monica, Cali­ fornia. It’s important to note that Santa Monica is located on the Westside of Los Angeles – one of the most auto-­ centric and traffic-congested regions of the United States. The black, nondescript, Chinese-manufactured scooters were powered by lithium-ion batteries, offered a range of 30 kilometers, and reached a top speed of 24 km/h. Curious pedestrians would seem puzzled as they walked up to these seemingly abandoned looking vehicles, which reminded them of the Razor scooters that were so popular in the early 2000s.

They soon figured out the scooters could be rented by downloading an app and scanning a QR code on the handlebars.

People of all ages and backgrounds began to ride them around town. It was as if a light bulb switch went off in their heads, some­thing with these scooters clicked, and adoption started to take off.

Over the next six months, the scooters began popping up all over neighboring communities and cities. It seemed to catch just about everyone off-guard when this little start-up, which we now know as Bird, raised over 400 million dollars in a round of funding.

Now, if we fast forward just over six months to today: stand-up electric scooters have become one of the fastest growing consumer products ever, with users taking tens of millions of scooter

trips in a matter of months. There are now more than 25 scooter companies on the market with hundreds of thousands of vehicle deployments in over 150 cities around the world. Billions of dollars of venture capital have been invested in this space, and major ridesharing firms like Uber and Grab have launched their own electric scooter services. Even auto­makers like Ford, who have acquired the scooter startup Spin, are jumping onto this emerging trend. Of course, rapid growth, and adoption also come with their own challenges, and head­ aches: issues with safety, infrastructure, seasonality, theft, and vandalism are just some of the problems that cities and communities are facing.

What we are witnessing is a larger trans­ portation trend called “micromobility”, of which scooters are just one instance.

The definition of micromobility includes small, lightweight utility vehicles that are predominantly powered by electricity, such as scooters or e-bikes. Often these vehicles can be used on bike lanes and move quicker through congested urban areas than cars can. The scooter explosion has exposed the fact that many cities around the world were designed and built around the automobile. Riders are left fighting for scraps of the urban infrastructure. The same questions we asked one hundred years ago with the introduction of cars are being asked once again: Where do we ride these vehicles? Where do we park them? What rules should they follow?

Today, cities are scrambling to answer these questions when it comes to ­elec­tric scooters. But regardless of whether it’s Henry Ford flooding cities with the Model T or Bird flooding cities with electric scooters, we have to remind ourselves: transportation revolutions are never smooth.

Iquis aut occum quam ius ximin

When we think about the future of transportation, most people assume disruption will be a vehicle that is simultaneously autonomous, electric, and shared.

Hundreds of billions of dollars have already been poured into this vision by major players like Ford and Tesla, start-ups like Zoox and Aurora, and tech companies like Google and Apple. The thing about disruption is that it’s not really disruptive if everyone can predict it.

True disruptive innovation (in the Clayton Christensen sense) is often overlooked, looks like a toy, and never poses a threat to the incumbent businesses – until one day it suddenly does.

MICHAL NAKASHIMADA CREATIVE DEVELOPER

Michal currently leads product at Ride Report. Previously he was a product manager at moovel Group.

He is also co-founder of Movements, a community and weekly newsletter around emerging mobility software and technology.

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38

SEARCHING FOR SMART CITY

by Raphael Reimann

SEARCHING FOR Technology has been changing the ways we interact with objects as well as with one another. Given the significant role that it already plays in our p ­ rivate lives, it is only a matter of time before it becomes an integral part of our public spaces. “Smart cities” are often just another word for fancy renderings of corporate visions, but if you look closely, you can find that a lot of this future technology is already here today, whether we like it or not. It’s our respon­ sibility as vocal citizens to decide how we want to live with these new systems, which can be as helpful as they can be harmful. And if at the end we will live in a crystal clear rendering or the complex and troubled reality.

TL;DR

The future as we render it – but how will we live it?

URBAN ENVIRONMENT IOT WATERLOO STATION DATA VIZ TRAFFIC STREET DNA VALUABLE NATURAL

SMART CITY

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RAPHAEL REIMANN CONTENT & MEDIA LEAD

Iquis aut occum quam ius ximin

Raphael is a digital geographer and urbanaut tracing the spatial patterns we leave behind...

He finished his master's degree in urban culture, society and space ❶2015. Questions about how our in mobility behavior shapes the cities we live in, and how these phenomenons can google be communicated for through spatial data, prototypes and experiments “moral machine” are what keeps Raphael's motivation running.

Our urban and digital environments are becoming more and more interlinked – how can we urban dwellers benefit?

More and more cities and city science had the urge to become smart around 2008. The term “smart city” started to become more evident in search trends and scientific literature just over 10 years ago. That was also round the time when our phones (iPhones and Android Phones became a thing around 2008), refrigerators and TVs (bit later, round 2010) started becoming smart. Having collected a bit of experience about healthy consumption of smart devices with digital wellbeing and “Screen Time” being a thing by now, the questions we should ask ourselves is how we can apply this when it comes to smartening up our urban environment.

By now, technology has permeated ­almost all parts of our lives. For the over 80% of people who own a smartphone (in most developed markets), it has become the node that interlinks all these different parts. The little helpers come in the form of apps and connected ­devices and services. Transferring this logic, cities “where traditional networks and services are made more flexible, efficient, and sustainable with the use of information, digital, and telecommunication technologies to improve its operations for the benefit of its inhabitants” is commonly understood as the concept of smart cities, although there is no consistent definition among practitioners and researchers.

Cities can bring many connected services to the table. By their inherent physical nature, these services can only exist through the Internet of Things, which is the backbone of the service’s communication infrastructure. A prime example for this is LinkNYC, a network of approximately 1,000 Wi-Fi hot spots embedded in a kiosk. They offer access to city maps, video calls, and two USB charging stations (these are intended to replace the pay phone network).

What is particularly interesting about LinkNYC’s network of Wi-Fi kiosks is

that, on the one hand, it offers access to the network (the Internet in this case) but, on the other hand, it also creates and opens this network for further use in other systems. Being in the hands of a private proprietor, this does imply a certain vulnerability though. Any system running its traffic via this network is not only logged by the proprietor, it is also heavily reliant on the uptime of the network.

One nice side effect of how Wi-Fi networks function is that every passing Wi-Fi device, dialed in or not, pings the network as it scans for potential nodes.

Logging this can result in a beautiful data set of movement patterns of devices (and their respective carrier) through the city. The accumulated data leads to another unavoidable topic when talking about what smart cities are – that city planning can benefit ­hugely from big data and the analysis and visualization this enables.

In 2017, Transport for London (TfL – the organization behind the London ­Under­ground) used this method to learn about travel behavior within their ­network.

By anonymously tracking their passen­ gers at 54 stations, TfL found out that around two-thirds of underground travelers rely on 2 of 17 (more of less viable) connections between King’s Cross and Waterloo station. The analysis also showed how delays on one ­line influenced demand on others, depicting the complex ties of urban transportation and allowing for improvements to the system or service where necessary.

Just google tfl wifi analysis to delve into this study.

QUOTE

“FOSTERING ACCESS TO NEW DATA SOURCES THAT HELP TO UNDERSTAND HOW OUR CITIES WORK IS KEY TO FINDING SMART CITIES.”

BY RAPHA

Visualizing the vast amount of data of each and every system embedded in a smart city is one way of making sense of it. By reducing complexity, meaningful information can emerge that wouldn’t have been visible before. With its organic and natural appearance, the data visualization project “Roads to Rome” attempts to visualize these complex ­relations in a very approachable way. The moovel lab has calculated 500,000 routes leading to Rome from all over Europe, displaying a map of traffic jams if everybody in Europe wanted to visit the Eternal City at once.

The project images show, on the one hand, how infrastructure has to follow natural conditions such as topography (looking at the road structure in the Alps, for example), but also how political decisions become apparent in reality – how the main arteries of traffic (on the map) are manifested on traffic white papers of the European Union, for example.

On an urban level, the visualizations of the Urban Mobility Fingerprint and Street DNA show the efficiency of a street network. Political and topological influences are also apparent when we look at London’s Urban Mobility Fingerprint and Street DNA. As the capital of the United Kingdom, London has been the largest city in the world for large parts of its urban history. Its almost ideal Street DNA shows very

PROJECT

ROADS TO ROME

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direct connections, created by a dense street network. However, when looking at the divided city of Jerusalem, a ­massive wall, numerous checkpoints, and a distinct topography define the cityscape, which ends in multiple devi­ations from the most direct route.

While “Roads to Rome” with its appealing aesthetics also bears a considerable amount of information, true value is created in smart cities by improving the city’s operations for the benefit of its inhabitants. This implies the interaction of inhabitants with information of value to them based on situation and context on location. TfL proposes, for example, the merging of information on upcoming train arrivals with capacity measured by their Wi-Fi system, signaling to you as a passenger to maybe skip the next overcrowded train and get a coffee while you wait for the next one instead.

Found it. Smart City symptoms: Link NYC

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Fostering access to new data sources that help to understand how our cities work is key to finding smart cities. This access can lead to new and unexpected features that are found where multiple disciplines meet – given that the com­plexity of our cities has grown to an extent no single discipline can cover.

We approached one of the biggest unsolved quests of mobility. Do all roads really lead to Rome? The outcome of this project is somewhere between information visualisation and data art.

View and interactively explore all roads to Rome and other cities: roadstorome.moovellab.com People involved: Benedikt Groß, Raphael Reimann, Philipp Schmitt