Formation @ Autotech Council

Formation’s Anne-Elise Chung to present keynote at Autotech Council event.

On Friday, April 17th, one of our interaction designers, Anne-Elise Chung, will speak at the Autotech Council event around fleets and shared mobility. The event is intended to discuss how mobility management is changing the automotive landscape. During her virtual keynote presentation, Anne-Elise will explore how the automotive design process must change to expand from private vehicle ownership towards shared mobility. We’ll discuss existing shared modes of transportation to highlight current challenges and potential opportunities, especially in these difficult times. We’ll be sharing years of insights in the Aerospace Industry related to cleanability, refurbishing, and reconfigurability and how we might apply those to the evolving automotive industry.

From Autotech Council’s site:

The future is fleets. An increasing number of futurists, city planners, and even car companies are coming to the consensus that the century of the privately owned car may be behind us. With an increasing number of people living in cities, we are fast-overwhelming the capacity of the roads resulting in all-day congestion- the antithesis of mobility.

Besides reducing the number of vehicles, another way of solving mobility is by area: we need to move a certain volume of people and goods using as little area of vehicle as possible. That objective can be met with fleets of shared vehicles, ranging from public transit, to Pod-style people-movers, through shared cars, to scooters. Fleets also solve another problem in our increasingly congested cities: car storage. By sharing the use of fleet vehicles, towns can regain the use of areas previously dedicated to parking.

Some aspects of this vision are clearly a few decades off. Private cars aren't going away soon, and progress won't be spread around evenly across urban and rural areas. However, other aspects of the transition to more fleet-based mobility have started in earnest. One need merely cite the names Uber, Lyft, Gig, Getaround, Zipcar, Maven, Lime, Byrd, and even Hertz, Ryder, or Sixt. Not to be left out, the conventional corporate fleets such as service vehicles for a telecom company, city, etc. are also in the mix, and have also made gains from field-force optimization technologies.

Update:

We had the pleasure of presenting the keynote on redesigning shared mobility with more than 150 attendees from different automotive companies,startups and OEMs. The virtual meeting was an engaging combination of insights from industry experts, market analysts, and thought provoking discussion. We were honored to share our design thinking, extensive experience, and foresight on upcoming challenges for the automotive industry, especially in these challenging times.

Thanks to everyone who was able to attend, for those of you that missed it, see the AutoTech Council recap.