In this episode, we talk with Sundberg-Ferar Director of Innovation Strategy, David Byron, to understand his thoughts on "the new time equation" within the future vehicle interior experience, and how designers can incorporate common leisure into the everyday commutes of vehicle occupants.
Watch the 2nd half of this conversation where Dave shows us visual concepts he designed to illustrate his ideas for architectural thrills in the future vehicle occupant experience // https://youtu.be/VF6fJOxtGVc?t=1070
If you're an innovation leader interested in any of these ideas, or if you're looking for a design & innovation partner, hit us up! We'd love to connect with you and share notes on new mobility. // hello@sundbergferar.com
Music: "Ridgeline", Ian Ethan Case
In this episode, we talk with Sundberg-Ferar Director of Innovation Strategy, David Byron, to understand his thoughts on "the new time equation" within the future vehicle interior experience, and how designers can incorporate common leisure into the everyday commutes of vehicle occupants.
Watch the 2nd half of this conversation where Dave shows us visual concepts he designed to illustrate his ideas for architectural thrills in the future vehicle occupant experience // https://youtu.be/VF6fJOxtGVc?t=1070
If you're an innovation leader interested in any of these ideas, or if you're looking for a design & innovation partner, hit us up! We'd love to connect with you and share notes on new mobility. // hello@sundbergferar.com
Music: "Ridgeline", Ian Ethan Case
You're listening to different by design. My name is Linnea Haggard.
Speaker 2:You know what, if you have 15 minutes of free time. And so we're thinking about new mobility, um, and, and if you have 15 minutes, we have 30 minutes or you have 45 minutes. What I choose to do with myself during that time changes as those increments go up. And I think we have to design with those types of parameters almost inconsideration, what's a 15 minute ride as an occupant look like. And how does a person go through this kind of value equation in their mind as to what I might choose to do? And what do we choose to design for their experiences? Given those different amounts of time
Speaker 1:Today, we'll be talking with an esteemed colleague of mine on this number for our team, David Byron. He is our director of innovation strategy. And throughout his time here at Stenberg for our, he has worked with some of our biggest clients on some of our biggest projects, but one of his big passion points is in mobility. He started out as a car designer, as he says, he lived with the dream and was lead designer at Celine and designed the 2008 S five S Raptor supercar and the 2010 saline, S 2 81. He also designed helmets with a sports brand warrior for a few years until finally joining Sandberg Farrar. Today, we're going to be picking Dave's brain a little bit on what has been interesting him lately in the world of mobility and in his philosophy, um, as he approaches the world of new mobility as a designer, um, and then some tips and thoughts that he has to share with us and with all of you out there who are, um, leaders and lovers of design, as we say, the other thing I'd like to mention is that half of this presentation stays in the verbal realm, but as is a workplace hazard with designers, part of this conversation gets into some very visual concepts that Dave himself designed. Um, and it shows me throughout this conversation, as well as some really arresting visuals, uh, that inspire those designs and his thought processes about the vehicle occupant of the future and the vehicle interior of the future. So go ahead and scroll down to the show notes and those links will be there so that you can view the rest of my conversation with Dave today. Um, the way that it was meant to be with the beautiful rich visuals from concepts that he designed himself. So hope you enjoy that. And the rest of our design discussion together today,
Speaker 3:[inaudible]
Speaker 1:Dave, let's start with, what's been on your mind lately, um, in the world of new mobility, what thoughts have been occurring to you and what ideas out there have been inspiring?
Speaker 2:I don't want to share here, just a kind of moving through some thoughts that have been developing over the last few years. Um, and then kind of w how, how this past year of this pandemic has changed that. And, and so part of this theme of mobility and where is mobility going in the future? You know, I am an automotive enthusiast. I have a sports car I love to drive, but, you know, designing for the driver is going to be a niche component of automobile and mobility in the future. And so I looked, just looked at the word occupant. And if we designed for occupants, sometimes just looking at definitions of the word, something jumps out at you. And what, what really caught me here was the end of the definition here, where it says it given time a person who resides in presents themselves in a house or a vehicle or a seat or a place at a given time. And I just, I thought that was really interesting. And I thought about the time. And so much of our product design is rooted in how much time we have in a given experience. So whether we're, we're really considering the first impression of a product, the usability of a product, where do we store it? How do we come back to it later? What's our longterm impression. So much of this is rooted in our long each of those pieces of the experience are. So I just kind of started thinking about the time here, and
Speaker 1:That is a fascinating concept. And then I bet that changes a lot of how you think about the new mobility experience or the experience of the occupant, as you were saying before.
Speaker 2:You know what, if you have 15 minutes of free time. And so we're thinking about new mobility, um, and, and if you have 15 minutes, we have 30 minutes, or you have 45 minutes. What I choose to do with myself during that time changes as those increments go up, I think we have to design with those types of parameters almost inconsideration, what's a 15 minute ride as an occupant look like, and how does a person go through this kind of value equation in their mind as to what I might choose to do? And what do we choose to design for their experiences, given those different amounts of time? So, part of it to me is also what's, what's our value of time a year later after working from home. I think a lot of us say, wow, I mean, I don't waste my time commuting to the office every single day. I mean, sometimes we're going to the office. Some people are now back to mixed week models. Some people are back to work only when meet when necessary. And they're working from home most of the time. And most of us here probably are at home right now. Um, so I'm not sure I want to give up that hour or hour and a half or two hours for some people of time. So I think we've realized we kind of reclaimed that time and I'm not sure I want to give it back.
Speaker 1:And I think most of us can relate to that to one degree
Speaker 2:Or another, right? So as, as, as an automobile industry or as a vehicle design mentality, we have to go forward and making sure that when we now take that time back from people to put them back in the vehicle, as autonomous capabilities come forth, there's going to be new value equations that are happening in people's kind of value structure as to what we do with that,
Speaker 1:That down into some points that we can be thinking about as designers and design leaders and, um, innovation strategy owners of our companies.
Speaker 2:So I broke out a couple perspectives here that I think anyone can consider when designing new vehicle experiences for the occupant. And one is, is it an owned vehicle or a rented vehicle, or rented a ride share, or any other model you want to talk about where you don't own that vehicle. And part of that is, and we forget this often, which is where do I bring my stuff? It's my stuff. I want to put stuff in my vehicle, but if I'm in a ride share, I don't leave anything behind it has to come with me. So that experience nugget right there can really change. How will you design that interior space, whether I'm owning or renting, and I can bring stuff with me or I can leave it in the vehicle later. And so, you know, an example is that I have a daughter and, and as any parent here knows, I have less time for hobbies. I used to play bass all the time and I very frequently or very, very rarely now get that moment to play the bass. I would love if you gave me 30 minutes a day in the car to bring my instrument a lot. Now, if I own the vehicle, I can leave it in the parking lot. But if I'm in a ride share scenario, I've got to now bring it with me and I've got to bring it what, to a meeting. I'm going to walk into that meeting and have my bass with me on my back and say, Hey, you know, I just use the last 30 minutes to play my bass on the way to this meeting. So mind if I put it down? I mean, you know, we're trying to talk about all these enabled new experiences, but if you don't consider all of the touch points along the way, you maybe don't enable that experience or mobile, Jim, I mean, this has come up a lot of times, you know, if you Google a mobile gym right now, this is what comes up. I mean, these are hilarious. These, these like, uh, shuttles that people are turning into mobile workstations and actually the number one market for these is like celebrities, celebrities will rent these and have them brought to like a movie shoot site so they can continue to work out while they're on, on site a movie shoot. But, um, people have said, well, man, if I have a 30 minutes in the car, I'd love to just, you know, set up a row machine or something. So, man, I mean, you know, you could probably put a seatbelt on and safely have a row machine in a, in a ride share vehicle. And, and, but then what you have to say to the person is you're going to show up sweaty and you bring your gym bag along. And so there's all these pieces to the whole story, automobile design. We often forget the story. What is the entire story that we're building are our potential design opportunities around so own versus rent? What model are we designing for? And do you align with that scenario? The next one, um, is public versus private. And that means are you designing for someone who's, uh, alone or with others? Because as soon as you're with others, you change your behavior. We all do as human beings, I react differently when we're alone versus when we're around other people. So are you asking someone to eat alone or with others or sleep alone or near other people or working, um, shopping? I think these are all things we've talked about in a new mobility honors opportunity model, but if I'm in a ride share scenario, it might be a little different. I might not feel comfortable shopping for something, you know, that I could have a stranger sitting next to me and they can see my phone, but if I'm by myself, maybe I would. You know, so I think we have to consider the fact that the future of ride sharing or future of mobility has to be considered in the context of how many people around you and are you, uh, riding alone or by yourself,
Speaker 1:Would you describe the industry's expectations for the ride share experience and also consumers expectations for the same thing? Are we being unrealistic? Are we being realistic? What is your take on that?
Speaker 2:Oh, so I mean, we, we could think about, uh, you know, this is a beautiful marketing ideal of what we all think riding buses would be like, right. A bunch of beautiful 25 year olds out taking mass transit.
Speaker 1:For those of you listening. And Dave is showing me a picture of a bunch of 25 year olds in a bus laughing and joking and seemingly best friends with the strangers in front of them. And behind them,
Speaker 2:This is a marketing photograph. This is not really happening, right? I mean, we all know that mass transit really looked like this.
Speaker 1:Dave is showing me a much less illustrious photo of a packed mass transit system of train or a bus, but everyone is looking down at their phones, kind of purposefully isolating from each other. And you can see it in their body language. You know, their arms are crossed or their hands are in front of their laps and heads down, you know, just withdrawn into own thoughts.
Speaker 2:This is the reality of mass transit. Okay. And so the context of how we behave when we're just around strangers is very different and everybody kind of closes their circle of, you know, of, of perception, very close to whether what you're looking at on your phone or, or what you're reading. And now obviously with germs and bass masks, that's that, that denseness is even getting closer. So we have to think about that as we design going forward at all times, somebody is either waiting or doing,
Speaker 1:That's a quote from one of our colleagues here at Sanburg froggy, Beck, our director of
Speaker 2:Strategic growth. And it just stuck with me. And I just, I wanted to throw that up here because I love that point of waiting versus doing your, your you're in one of those camps at all times. So, Hey, everybody here, that's on this conference, you're doing something. But when you go to the Costco gas station, that line is so long, you spend a lot of time waiting just to do something and pump your gas. Um, so both scenarios though need to be designed for, and, you know, driving is the current doing paradigm in mobility in cars right now, you're driving now we're transitioning into things like super cruise and Tesla, autonomous pilot mode, and trying to say, well, okay, are we giving back a little bit of that time? Or we allow allowing drivers to transition away from that and kind of stepping into that occupant load. So, Hey, when you were talking earlier about the, you know, uh, Elon Musk followed, you know, 20, 37 autonomous vehicles would be as ubiquitous as, uh, riding a horse. I mean, I hope so. I love that future, um, ideal, and then we'll all be able to be occupants when we want, and I'll be a driving enthusiast and drive my, uh, silly Mustang when I want to as well too, I have the choice to do both. Um, so, but just getting into this part of it though, about the time piece of it, when do you go in a vehicle trip length from killing time waiting to actually decide to do something? I think this is a really, really interesting just piece of psychology on human behavior. If you give me 15 minutes of time, I kind of like that point where I'm not sure I'm going to actually do anything. I might just kill it. And what I mean by kill it is like pick up my phone basically is what everybody does. If you're stuck somewhere for 10 minutes, it's not really enough time to like engage in something. Um, you know, so I think though, if you move over to 30 minutes, now you start to kind of tip over to like, okay, 30 minutes is too much. I don't have 30 minutes to waste in my life. So give me 30 minutes. Now I'm going to do something. And there's so many, like, you know, articles and all this self-help about, you know, the best ways to spend your time. Or, you know, if you, if anybody here, you know, scroll through LinkedIn, you see posts all the time about, you know, habits of successful people and whatnot. Um, you know, and, and we know we have this time to, uh, you know, work from home and make the most of that. So I think we've almost even learned more about little increments of time and how to make most of that. So I think then that starts to become this point where we have to design for the time intended to be in that vehicle. If it's 10 minutes, you're probably just killing it. But when you tip over to that point, where now it's meaningful, I might do something. So I'm sharing here a little, uh, uh, animation of a design I did for a client looking at, um, urban mobility solutions and utilizing a ride sharing. And we talked about, well, what if the mobile conference room now actually went around and picked up your clients? And you had your meeting on the go. And by the time the meeting was done, you're dropping everybody off. So you have that opportunity to come together. You have your meeting, you have that more enrich, enriching, engaging human to human experience, but think about spaces in Shanghai where office space is super valuable, but yet it takes two hours to get across town. You know, there's market opportunity for a product like this. So we were looking at glass displays and transparency and privacy and all that kind of stuff, but it was just a really fun activity to look at, uh, the type of experiences you could have, um, in a new interior architectural space of, of automotive. So again, this a weighting versus doing, I love this part of like, okay, well, what if we now have a new value equation? Maybe my commute is 24 minutes, but I actually want it to be 30. Or if my, if I had a meeting every morning, that was 45 minutes, I want to get in the vehicle. I want the meeting and the ride to actually be in sync. So I get to my destination at the right time, like, right. I don't want to arrive with 12 minutes left in my meeting. It actually becomes a struggle in how I figure out what to do with my segmented pieces of time every day. So what if you could actually book rides based on time and the ride maybe was actually cheaper if it was longer because the operator could operate the vehicle with electrical power more efficiently. So your average speed was reduced to say 47 miles an hour instead of 70 miles an hour. And because you consume less energy operating at a slower speed, maybe it actually was cheaper to take longer. I mean, what a novel idea, right. But I think being able to control your time to travel is a really new future mindset. And it's completely not how we think about it right now. And the other thing that we have to really consider is what can you do, but what can't you do in a moving environment? Because some people just can't really enjoy moving environments because of the dynamics of motion. You know, some people have so much emotion, sensitivity that they can't even read in a car. Um, I have a family member who can not turn backwards for more than like 15 seconds at a time to talk to somebody behind them in a moving vehicle, or they completely get disoriented. Um, so this is a huge opportunity, I think for businesses into the dimension systems or seat design, or even HMI, uh, glass displays, smart glass, to really understand the human limitation of performing what we want to do in a car. It's not just a moving living room. It's, it's got inertia and momentum and tipping and all this stuff. So, um, I think that's a really, it's something that needs to be considered. So kind of summarizing these, I put them here as there's the four points that if I were designing futures and mobility experiences, I would really start by answering each one of these questions to say, who am I designing for? And how do I make that argue? Did Ford's the right need on each side of these kinds of equations. So I added some more thoughts going into like this cool, like little experiment.
Speaker 1:Um, why don't you give us a quick sneak peek at, um, what people can expect to see in the link in the show notes, the rest of our discussion together, and the visuals and designs that you shared with us.
Speaker 2:So then because of the last year, you know, we're, we're more sensitive to our use of time. So we're really looking at compelling experiences and there's, you know, there's this, this the higher to get away, right? I mean, I think kind of as friends, we've all talked about this, like, oh, actually it was nice to go to the office yesterday and get out of the house and, uh, you know, going to a museum, if you can, or just being able to get back inside a restaurant is like, well, this is a cool interior space. Um, and so I think we are, we're all excited to, you know, about getting into unique and compelling spaces, um, but also still being productive. So I think the view, the vehicle of the future needs to be designed from the inside out truly. And you should be looked at as architectural spaces and opportunities like an interior designer approaches a purposeful room with form and function. And I was looking at just really amazing pieces of architecture. And, you know, if you, if you walk into a museum or some auditoriums and, or lobbies in some hotels, and you kind of have that moment where you, you step in and you just kind of look up and you have that moment and the lights coming in and it's like, almost angels are singing. I don't, I don't know if that's, you know, something that exists stepping into a car. I mean, there are great car interiors, but it's a totally different, you know, you're missing the grandness of architecture that, that happens in, in really amazing spaces or playing with light. Like I just, I love the way these couple, uh, shots here showcase that the intentional way of cutting the lights. So as the sun comes through and it shifts, it really changes your, your impression of the space. And the other thing I think is that when you have an interesting interior lighting maybe perspective, the shape of the exterior also becomes really interesting. So I went through a series of just design explorations, and I, this is really outside of my normal way of designing a vehicle, but I think it was really fun. And, and so I went into CAD that I, I designed these really conceptual physical forms in CAD, and then threw it in KeyShot and use KeyShot to render this. And I, my thought here was what if this was what a sunroof looked like? I've never seen a sun reflect this in a car, but man, that would be great if you walked in and you looked up in a ride share van or something, and this is what the top of a shuttle bus or six person band looked like, or even just the long escalate length. I mean, they're so long you could easily get this kind of dynamic shape in that proportion. And I thought, man, why not? I mean, that would be such a cool way to see the light come in and just, you know, bring your attention upward. And so then I kind of turned that well, what does that mean for the exterior of the vehicle? And I just created these nontraditional vehicle shapes, but if we're not looking at this from driving and we're looking at this from ride sharing, maybe, uh, there's a different exterior form language that comes from this. So I, I just created a little name here for the theme energize, and maybe this is, you know, to me, this was the vehicle. If I was going out for a night out with my wife or my buddies, this is the vehicle I'd want and I'd want to step in and see that amazing, uh, uh, roof architecture and have this kind of dynamic experience going on.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much again, Dave, for sharing your thoughts with us today, it has been fascinating. And for those of you listening in, go ahead and scroll down to the show notes and take a look at the rest of what Dave shared with us. Um, as well as stunning visuals. And if you are a design leader or innovation leader in your company, and you would like to talk to us more about the future of mobility, or if you have any particular idea or project in mind that you're working on and are seeking out a design and innovation partner hit us up@helloatsummerfarrar.com. We love just shooting the breeze anytime about design and new mobility. We would love to say hi, thanks again for joining us today. My name is Linnea Haggard, and this is different by design a podcast by Sandberg for our product innovation studio in Detroit.
Speaker 3:[inaudible].