MOBIPUNT AS SOCIAL CONNECTOR IN THE NEIGHBOURHOOD
Graduation project revolving around redesign of a mobility hub (final grade: 9/10). The project revolved around designing the social interaction on (future) mobility hubs.
The result was a future mobility hub concept and design principles.
In this project I worked with Advier, a small consultancy firm working in mobility.
MARCH 2020
Design research, concept design, graphic design, rapid prototyping
Design
How I worked
I had a lot of freedom in this project. Therefore I decided to use a design method I hadn’t used before. For this project that was Vision in Product Design (VIP). VIP is great for designing futures and specifiying interactions. With it you can spend months designing futures and interactions before the thing-to-be-designed becomes clear. This appealed to me because it suits my strong points.
During this project I discovered that I like to work with ‘strong concepts’: ideas that determine many design decisions. These concepts give the design focus. Things like metafors, one-liners or contradictions. Next to that they make the design proces stick with me and the users.
Some examples include characterizing the hub journey as ‘positive friction’, designing the user-hub interaction as mother-child, or describing two user tendencies as ‘quantum superpositioning’.
If that sounds vague, that is correct. But these kind of concepts make the design journey playful for me and also make it easy to communicate ‘the idea’ to users and stakeholders.
What I learned
- How to design strong concepts
- How to apply Vision in Product Design method
- Observation for design research
- Solo design of a project
- How to evaluate with experts
- Dealing with stakeholders
- Collaboration in business environment
Process
This project revolves around redesigning the future mobihub for the context of the Netherlands. A mobihub (or mobipunt in Dutch) is a brand of mobility hub.
A mobility hub is defined as
“A recognizable, physical place where different context-driven functions and services (mostly shared mobility-related such as shared cars) that benefit the neighbourhood meet. A connection to public transport is desirable but type-dependant.”
Vision in Product Design (VIP) was used as the main design & research method.
ViP is future focused and interaction-central, which made it ideal for this design question.
It was found that users on a transport hub always navigate the space between being connected and being autonomous, while they experience positive or negative ‘friction’ (events that slow them down) during their travels. The amount of ‘being connected’ and ‘autonomy’ that a user experiences or seeks, depends on that users personality.
Based on this, the design statement was formed:
“The mobihub needs to wake up people by introducing a kind of positive friction (that literally and figuratively slows them down) at their local or commute mobihub, with which they can choose to interact, together or alone”
The mobihub needs to facilitate for two kinds of people at the same time. The fact that the mobihub needs to be in these two states at the same time was compared to the principle of ‘quantum superpositioning’. In quantum superpositioning, a quantum particle can be in two places at the same time.
After an ideation period a design direction was found. This design direction revolves around modular multi-purpose interactive capsules on the mobihub. With these capsules, inhabitants can combine their mobility patterns. Inhabitants can deliver packages for each other, lend or sell each other items, or pick up groceries. The capsules and the supporting app form an open-ended platform that can be used by the inhabitants as they see fit.
This design direction was prototyped (figure 3) and evaluated with users and experts. The functionalities were viewed as very beneficial, but the design direction did not provide a meaningful interaction between place (mobihub) and user (inhabitant).
After an extended period of research, it was found that the mobihub should act as a concerned parent through the app and the interactive capsules. The mobihub acting as a concerned parent gives the relationship between user and hub more meaning, because it mirrors wanted mobility patterns. The hub is a concerned parent that needs to ‘educate’ it’s users about responsible mobility usage, and ‘take care’ of them. The user, in turn, has the responsibility to keep visiting his ‘parent’.
The final design was dubbed “mobi+punt” (Mobipuntplus or Mobipluspunt) and was evaluated with relevant experts in an expert meeting. It was evident that social cohesion the most relevant success factor of the design is, as well as efficiency in delivery methods and extra value for the neighbourhood. The main limitations all revolved around the business model and implementation -questions. The final design is still conceptual, and there are much unknowns about its eventual realisation. The experts recognized that it is an idea with a lot of potential.
