Imagining provocative transportation futures for the city that never sleeps.

Problem

The future of mobility is rapidly evolving, with new products, services, and solutions cropping up nearly every week. In the dense urban infrastructure of the New York City region, transportation is a critical and complex challenge on many levels. The diversity of modes, the large populace with a tapestry of transportation needs, and the complexity of infrastructure and policy constraints provide the perfect setting to think critically about what the possibilities are and explore the implications of different possible futures. Designit NYC embarked on an internal project, using speculative design methods to imagine the future in 2050.

Responsibilities

I contributed to the research, concept development, and execution. In addition, I co-led the project delivery and provided guidance to the other team members to ensure it kept moving forward – always a challenge with internal initiatives!

Designit team

Service designer
Research Director
Design Director
5x Service designers

Design Research

Our research effort revolved around three key pillars: People, Policy, and Modes of Transit. To understand these dimensions in-depth we involved the whole studio to observe and document their commutes, did contextual observation in a variety of key transit locations, and did secondary research to understand the policy-level drivers of transit infrastructure as well as the history and evolution of various modes of transit over NYC's history.

From this data, we identified key insights from each dimension that we could use to speculate about the future of transportation.

Future themes

In order to further structure our future thinking, we synthesized the insights from the three research pillars into a set of future themes that would shape the future of transportation solutions.

Ideation

To begin our concept phase, we gathered the whole studio for a workshop to ideate around the future themes. We created a set of prompts and stimuli materials that would help unconstrain the team's thinking, in order to truly push beyond the near-term horizon view into a 15-20 year timeframe. Using the speculative futures framework, we mapped out possible, plausible, and preferable futures and prioritized a set of ideas for each theme that we felt would be provocative yet possible. 

Concept development

Following the workshop, three teams ran in parallel to flesh out a concept each, with myself and another designer acting as program leads bringing everything together. Together we iterated on and refined the initial ideas, to develop concepts that felt real, plausible, recognizable, and thought-provoking.

Future storytelling

In order to bring an element of storytelling and tangibility to the ideas, we decided to create an immersive world through the use of fictional podcasts and future narratives, visual artifacts, and a microsite for a fictional media company to house it all. 

© Jake Barnett 2024. All rights reserved.