FORD THRIVE - Time Spent Well

Abstract

Autonomous driving technologies are expected to revolutionize the way people will
experience travel time and interact with new means of transportation. Simultaneously, the consumer mind-set is found shifting from the desire to own towards gathering meaningful experiences and having access to services and goods on demand. Thus, it its proposed that the Ford Motor Company - famous for being the first car company making the car affordable and accessible for everyone – should include the creation of novel user experiences to further distinguish the company’s position in a competitive and changing mobility landscape.
The analysis of public transport behaviour
and the current use of travel time by business commuters has revealed the potential for autonomous mobility to improve the everyday urban commuting experience. Thereby, the proposed concept introduces a radical approach for innovating the meaning of urban mobility and travel time. It envisions to transform the everyday business commute into a well-being ritual, that empowers urban citizens to dedicate their travel time to sustaining their personal well-being. The latter was found increasingly challenging due to the pressure caused by high-performance-driven societies and their fast pace lifestyle
in western cities. Hereby, the concept of mobility for well-being is further rooted in growing trends of consumers seeking for methods and activities helping them to sustainably foster what it
takes to live a happy life.
The proposed concept provides commuters with a progressive well-being experience that includes the positive effects of personal engagement
and the daily commuting routine. The proposed concept is a combination of both product and service design, that can be accessed while booking and traveling on-board an autonomous vehicle. Empathy, customizability and proactivity were given high priority during the development of the design system. Hence, an open service platform was generated that provides the customer with variable and progressive
content. In addition, affective computing and
the potential of involving machine learning was investigated with the aim to offer a more natural human-machine interaction.
The design process followed an agile approach that allowed the designer to analyse, synthesise and elaborate on genuine design solutions that would do the context justice. Hereby, the project started with a user-centred and generative research phase which was then, concluded with the identification of several opportunity spaces. From this, a clear design vison was formulated, that guided the designer in generating a pool of apt ideas. The following conceptualization phase focused on the elaboration of one design direction that revealed to become a holistic system solution. The latter was influenced by the application of various design fields, including design activities in product, service
and interaction design. In close collaboration with strategic experts, working in the field of autonomous mobility and design experts from the TU Delft, specialized in design for innovation and well-being, the designer was eager to create based on both facts and imaginative power. Subsequently, a user-centred, meaningful, radical and complex design innovation resulted. The proposed concept highlights the added value daily mobility could have for urban well-being.