Re*Move

Five Trends for the Tens

There are some really important changes going on that will shape the process of designing cities, and how we move and interact in them, over the next decade. Here's Mark's shortlist:

1. Huge cuts and a focus on the essential

Everyone - from entrepreneurs to public administrators, needs to adapt to a world where innovation "culture" is no longer focused around the bleeding edge, the piece of the economy that is the "growth" market. Instead, the most important innovation will focus on achieving dramatic cost savings or improvements in the usefulness of essential services - stuff that absolutely has to happen, rather than 'nice to haves'. In other words, the target market will be the "decline" market. Don't be scared. This is surprisingly good news, because we'll focus on solving big problems, instead of peripheral ones.

2. The gulf between skills and jobs

While today's corporates and governments meet at "Cloud Computing" conferences to debate how to put their boring, dated processes online in new ways, a new generation of digitally-empowered workers is approaching over the hill. These people need jobs, and already have, on their own laptops, far more flexible, powerful, communicative tools than almost anything that exists in the firms they're applying to work for. The result is going to be a crisis - new skills and new tools that many firms will resist adopting until it's too late. Young people will be hired into environments, start using 'enterprise' systems, and conclude that everything is lame. Successful firms (and governments) will attract the talent, harness these people and embrace the constantly evolving set of tools these people bring for themselves.

3. Big office space becomes obsolete

We all need somewhere to work - but what most organisations don't need is large buildings with big reception areas and "working" floors packed with desks and computer workstations. Yet today, the office is the definition of modern business and modern cities. This is about to change. Expect great confusion as developers and property owners resist the change (and the resulting fall in building values), while others see the opportunity to create larger, more flexible living and working spaces, possibly made available in completely new ways. You'll also see networks of people who came together digitally move into physical environments for the first time, in a big way. This will be exciting. Remember, New York lofts used to be warehouses and factories. Throughout history, new communication networks, from ships to railways to cars, have always led to the creation of new physical communities built because of them.

4. Consumerism in crisis

This one deserves two paragraphs. A couple of questions will dominate debate over the next few years. Will we expand or reduce the gap between rich and poor? Is a society whose wealth is measured based on the production and consumption of things, or the manipulation of their on-paper value, actually sustainable (economically, not just in terms of resources).

The dramatically changing ability of people to share what they do and think has the potential to reshape the way we decide what to buy, and how we articulate the experience of using those things. We're not saying you won't buy stuff - it just won't be the same hierarchy as it's been for decades. As the ripples from the financial crisis continue, fundamental questions about what wealth is, what it means, and how it should be demonstrated, will make for an interesting era. Notions of ownership have been in flux ever since most people stopped buying music, as an object to own. In an era when an iPhone is now a more useful, cheaper, social vehicle than a Ford Fiesta for many (especially young) people, an "Apps" culture means we are likely to buy lots more virtual stuff, rooted in software, where the emphasis is on doing rather than just having. The authenticity of objects, and the connections and associations they imply, is also likely to become ever more important.

5. Open versus closed

London's teenagers are likely all by themselves to generate and organise far more data than London's public authorities will over the next ten years. As the power of open source collaboration stretches beyond software, as the masses rush to share updates, pictures, and video of what they're doing and what they think, we're going to hit some nasty issues. These might be about security, privacy, lifestyle, even thought. But a lot of them will be about people defending existing approaches, who seek to undermine and discredit those who believe that by sharing ideas, knowledge and resources, we can create more wealth and better cities. Watch this space.

Joe and I would love to talk to people who have views on any of this. Bounce us a note, leave a comment, or please share this with others who may be interested. If you're in London, drop by and we'll film your comments. Or if you want to write a nice guest blog, we'll post it.

Mark Charmer is a researcher at The Movement Design Bureau. He's also a co-founder of Akvo.

Introducing Electric Delivery

Electric Delivery is a new Movement Design Bureau project to explore and document fleet electric vehicles, particularly delivery vans and trucks.

The delivery van market is one of the first areas in which the electric vehicle could become the new transportation standard. The relatively short trips, often in stop-and-go traffic are ideally suited to current generation electric vehicles, unlike some of the more traditional uses of the car.

Fleet vehicle buyers can spend the time to understand the bottom line benefits - environmental and financial - for making the electric vehicle switch in a way that ordinary car buyers cannot always do, making fleet buyers able to switch to new electric vehicle options more easily than ordinary car drivers.

Our new project - Electric Delivery - seeks to understand the commercial electric vehicle market in real detail: over the next six months we will talk to vehicle manufacturers, fleet managers, drivers, customers, and everybody else involved in making real electric vehicles work.

There's a real chance that a new generation of battery technology will give us great new electric vehicles which are more sustainable, affordable, simple, reliable and higher performance than current generation gas and diesel vehicles.

That's for tomorrow. Electric Delivery is about documenting the progress of the working electric vehicle today. White vans first.

See more of The Movement Design Bureau's coverage of future transport, strategy and vehicles - including several in depth interviews and analysis with Ford's top sustainability and design people, here.

Posted by Vinay Gupta and Joseph Simpson on 21st May 2009.

Three New Shapes for Ford – Sue Cischke, meet @amydoesdesign and @potatowedge

Last Thursday we interviewed Ford's Sue Cischke about the company's sustainability strategy. Then on Saturday we met design students in the DAAP (Department of Design, Architecture, Art & Planning) at The University of Cincinnati (UC).  Two of those students - Amy Johannigman and Robb Hunter, now follow Dan Sturges and Drew Smith in giving their views on what Sue said, and what Ford should do next. Over to Amy and Robb...

Sue has a great base of conversation. We loved that she dropped the “T” bomb (TRAIN!) right at the beginning. Her knowledge of Ford’s current sustainable facts and figures proved her credibility. The mention of a “Hub Concept” got us hopeful that Ford has big plans in this space.

But while she seems to be developing some models for Ford’s future, we would like the shape of these models to reflect more progressive shifts. Peter Drucker reminds us that "wherever you see a successful business, someone once made a courageous decision".

We’ve three key points, and have represented each one graphically. We call them “Shapes for Sue”. The ideas they contain are explained in the text below each diagram.

1. Be a Game Changer


At a recent Designer’s Accord meeting in NYC, Allan Chochinov of Core77 said "we know too much not to design in a sustainable manner”. He’s right. The facts are in, and climate change has created a situation that is in urgent need of addressing. Sue's talk of "transitional changes" will not suffice, when one considers the magnitude of our problem. We need bold actions and strict practices from industry leaders.

We need to impress behavioral change within users to set firm attitudes and outcomes. Ford has the opportunity to be a "Game Changer" as P&G’s A.G. Lafley would say, and implement large scale shifts. Traditional business models would see Sue's prescribed strategy of "near-term, midterm, and long-term" solutions as smart. But these are strategies for a previous era - comfortable change rather than radical rebirth. If Ford claims to be an industry leader, it needs to step up, and differentiate itself as such. The danger is that the world is now changing much faster than Ford.

2. Mash-ups not Mix-tapes


Mash-ups are a current, popular form of music created by taking parts of many existing songs and overlapping, restructuring, and recreating them into an entirely new compilation. A mash-up creates a song from familiar parts but creates an entire new way of hearing it. Artist Greg Gillis (aka GirlTalk), may mix Pras's "Ghetto Superstar" and Yo La Tengo's "Autumn Sweater" all in less than 30 seconds. We think Ford should see this as an inspiration and analogy for creating industry partnerships. Currently, Ford’s partnerships feel more like a mix-tape, a mix of single tracks from different albums on one tape. Most of Sue’s discussion paints Ford as merely a hardware maker. Ford needs to reach out and begin partnerships that embrace service design, infrastructure change, mobile urban living. The possibilities are endless when we are open to creative, collaborative, non-traditional forms of ourselves.

3. Co-Creation

 
Sue spoke of Ford’s interest in current thought leaders and Industry conferences. It seems to be talking with many of the industry's tastemakers to make more informed decisions. The fact that Ford has created positions for sustainable strategy and social media are impressive in themselves. Yet while creating all these new positions and discussions, Ford seems to have forgotten the primary rule of ‘sales’: be a good listener. Ford’s product development models a collaborative inner-circle of new-age hybrid leadership. This model resembles a funnel and seems to focus more on "a perception’s game" as Scott Monty describes in a January 12, MDB interview than a receptive open-source model.

Traditional leadership models will not meet the pressing needs of our current economy, and climate change. We propose a co-creation model similar to the work of academic design researcher Liz Sanders, in her "Make-Tools" workshops. The idea of co-creation is not design by democracy, but rather design by listening. The advent of social media penetrates today's participatory culture in completely new ways - ones that are highly digestible by the public.

So come on Ford, let's cut the jargon, turn up our tweets and begin a real dialogue. One that's devoid of traditional marketing and watered down plans.

Amy Johannigman and Robb Hunter are both currently undergraduate students in the Department of Design, Architecture, Art and Planning at The University of Cincinnati. Amy majors in Product Design and has worked at The Ford Motor Company among others, while Robb majors in Transportation Design and has worked at Hasbro toys, DEKA and Intrago.

Both bring a multi-disciplinary approach to what they do - favouring collaborative processes over demarcated disciplines.

Ford and Sustainability - the view from the top

On Thursday, Joe and I spent an hour talking with Ford's Sue Cischke. She's basically Ford's chief sustainability officer - right up at the top of the company's uber 60s World Headquarters building in Dearborn, Michigan.

We filmed the whole thing, and you can see it below.

I'm asking our network to share their views on the content - those we've met over the years who stand out as visionary thinkers on the changes going on in the economics and nature of how we move. The first of these is Dan Sturges, and you can see what he has to say shortly.

But we meet new thinkers every day and I'd love to hear from you - and share your comments - if you've got something to add. Feel free to feature this on your own sites and embed our interview (click the 2 prong button in the blip control bar). Email me if you want access to the video file. It's Creative Commons ShareAlike 3.0.

If you want to join in, comment below, or get in touch via Twitter @charmermark or @joesimpson.

Mark Charmer is founder of The Movement Design Bureau.

Disclosure: Ford's sponsoring The Movement Design Bureau's research in 2009. But our brief is to be critical and independent. We take that seriously. If you think we're not, I want to know.

Tata Nano: the dawn of a new automotive era?

Take note of today's date, because Tata officially put on sale its revolutionary Nano car earlier, and it may well change the automotive and wider-world landscape. The £1350, or '1 Lakh' vehicle has been heralded as a development to transform the lives of millions, by opening up access to personal mobility for many in the developing world who up until now have largely been denied it.

It's very easy to be critical of this. Environmentalists have, and will continue to warn that the Nano constitutes nothing more than a complete environmental disaster for the planet. However, this is somewhat rich coming from western critics who for years have taken personal urban mobility for granted. I recently discussed my views on the Nano in a Q&A follow up to the Geneva auto show, with Daniel Gray who runs MPGomatic.com. Playing devil's advocate, Daniel asked of me:

"The $2500 Tata has captured the imagination of many. It would seem that a mass-produced vehicle at this remarkable price point could offer mobility to millions, at the sacrifice of safety and air quality. Is the cost to society worth it?"

To which - I still think it's worth repeating, my answer runs as follows:

"There are two ways of looking at the Nano question. You can either say that opening up car ownership and mobility to millions more will prove nothing more than a societal and environmental disaster. Or the other way of looking at it (which I favour) is to say this: The car was designed to overcome the carnage that occurs on India’s roads every day. Entire families, traveling as one on motorcycles - are killed in (mainly low speed) accidents. The Nano’s never going to receive 5 stars in a crash test, but Indian road conditions are so different that it is questionable how relevant a measure this is. So in the low speed accidents which are most common, the Nano may actually ’save’ lives, because it will protect its occupants, who would otherwise have been traveling, unprotected, on motorcycles.

In terms of emissions, it apparently has better fuel economy than the Prius that is about to be replaced, so they’re not that far off the mark, efficiency-wise. What we need to hope and encourage to happen, is for developing country’s transport fleets, to leap-frog to future propulsion technologies such as compressed air, electric or even hydrogen, very quickly for their vehicles. The big question is whether the world can truly cope with millions of more cars. Unfortunately, that’s a question all of us need to ask. And until we find new, better, innovative ways to move about in the developed world, we’re going to struggle to impress our hopes and fears on the developing one."

Since the Geneva auto show, future-positive automotive news has been more than a little hard to come by. Instead we've done things like become obsessed with what a clanger Aston Martin dropped with its new Lagonda SUV concept. While the Lagonda and the Nano bear no direct comparison and will rarely be mentioned in the same sentence, it's worth stopping to consider them as representative of two very disparate slices of automotive thinking right now. Perhaps picking up on the flack they received right from the get-go about the Lagonda, Aston's team were quick to stress that the Lagonda was primarily pitched at developing markets (like India). Their logic appears to be that SUVs are beloved of the middle classes and oligarchs who live in such regions, often because the roads are in such poor condition - so greater ride height and four-wheel drive are a must. As presumably, is the ability to make potholes bigger, and to further erode away loosely made dirt roads, which 4x4s tend to do. Clearly, enforcing a 'them and us' societal imbalance has nothing to do with it...

the Lagonda SUV concept in the Geneva auto salon 2009... draw your own conclusions

I don't need to state the obvious here, but in many ways what the Lagonda embodies represents something very ugly about how certain sections of the automotive industry currently go about their business. The Nano, for all its critics, reduces the very essence of what a car is to its constituent parts. Protection from the elements, ability to carry bodies and goods at a speed faster than possible on bike or foot, while taking less human effort, and a means of directly connecting two geographically discrete locations. The Nano should merely be to the Asian sub-continent what the Mini, 500, Beetle and 2CV were to Europe last century, and the Model-T Ford was right at the beginning of it in the US too. Many will say that this makes it a bad thing. I'd caution that we should look beyond simplistic and single-viewpoint environmental assessments before jumping to that conclusion.

It may yet prove to be a vehicle the world is unable to sustain in an ecological sense, but by creating access to the fundamentals of automobility for new echelons of society, it could prove to be the most important car of this decade, maybe even the century. Somehow I suspect the Lagonda will be remembered for altogether different reasons.

Posted by Joseph Simpson on 23rd March 2009

Lagonda image kindly provided by Drew Smith. Nano image: Joseph Simpson