Desktop Mobility

Being from the transportation field, I feel like an odd fish here amongst you designers. I get intimidated doing slides for you guys. If you have to come design a car in front of me, you'll know what I'm talking about.

Introduction

I saw this huge gap between the bicycle or the motor scooter and the car. And I found that internationally, there is this huge gap too. In 1998, with a little bit of seed funding, like $20,000, myself and a partner built a car for the developing world-a utilitarian motor scooter.

We were trying to create a neighborhood vehicle and in America, at that time the only comparable thing that existed was the golf cart. So I got a little bit premature, a little bit ahead of the thing-I was making folding neighborhood vehicles, and no one knew what a neighborhood vehicle was.

What was significant about this vehicle was that all the tooling and technology needed to make 10,000 a year cost less than a million dollars (less than is needed to tool a ski boot). It had 600 parts and self-assemblies, and we had 20 people in the company that put this thing on the road. The other cool thing about it is that the neighborhood vehicle is the first new category of motor vehicle in America since 1973. It's now considered a low-speed vehicle, NTSA formally recognizes it and it can go on most states' roads, 20 to 30 miles per hour.

1. The future of mobility As we at frogdesign see it-how converged media could really play an important role in a whole lifestyle change

First of all, we hear so much about electric cars. But even if there's a magic fairy somewhere that can make all of our cars electric, right now, the streets of New York probably won't be any better for getting to the airport. It's more than just dealing with air quality. We've got to deal with land use and other kinds of things. I go out to the Bay Area about once a month and I'm on the 101 freeway going by Microsoft's new campus going one mile an hour. And I've got this kind of vision now-sort of James Bond style-that these signs that come up out of the trunks of the cars. And these signs unfold-they kind of look like highway signs, and they say, "You are in the most technologically advanced country on the planet." And we're crawling at one mile an hour. That's pretty sad. So my little clean car, while it's a great thing, just isn't going to do the job alone.

I met Jeff Bezos (the guy who started amazon.com) for a few seconds at a conference and it was the first time that I thought that something a billionaire was saying that was absolutely wrong. He was talking about how neighborhoods would change-how shopping would change-but he's never once considered that the average price that Americans are paying on their cars is about $6,000-6,500 a year to own and maintain. So you've got a $6,500 egg over here, and a $6,500 egg over here-and if you start sending a lot of packages to me, .com, where's this value? Where's this synergy? Where will my savings come from? So if you're not really talking about transportation, you're not really dealing with the big picture. At least, my little brain says that.

2. How transportation affects architecture, urban design-the physical world around us-and how it's going to change in the near future.

So this is just one little drawing that I did way back when I started talking about the system-the idea that these little vehicles could be used to run down and pick up your package. It started a kind of system-thinking. And if you talk to any of the really great engineers in this country, if you talk to Paul MacCready who did the human-powered aircraft, they talk about the need for more systems-like thinking. And so when people say, "What's the future of transportation?" they expect me to say, "It's the purple car that levitates!"-and it just isn't. I mean, really, it's just a bunch of things that people are already doing, just making them better.

Driving to a neighborhood center to pick up your packages could have a lot of advantages. One, UPS and FedEx will tell you how expensive it is to have each one of their drivers bring this giant truck to your house and then try to find you without getting bitten by a dog. It also affects the cost of your package. There's also some really nice social elements of going to the community and not staying at your home the whole time. But you just can't go and get Ford Motor Company or any other company to redesign a town for a price: like, for this price, Honda will make Boulder, Colorado better. It's just not going to happen like that. You've got to involve people at a different level; you've got to work with a lot of organizations. The process is really complex, but it can be really fun.

And all of a sudden there are these people doing car sharing. Instead of renting a Ford Taurus for a whole three years and having it be everything for my three years, I just drive down to a little neighborhood center and on a sunny day, I take a Miata. On a day I want to go on a camping trip, I take something else. And because I'm telecommuting more, and because I'm taking these low-cost vehicles more, that actually balances out the economic equation to be very favorable. And you have a great vehicle-a great tool for the right application. In Switzerland 30,000 people are car-sharing today. It's not really a fantasy.

At frog, we're starting to look at how this vision of a community mobility system could actually roll out. Neighborhoods become a little bit more like harbors, and you slow down traffic, and you have this ability to get your packages and get linked to transit. And there's a lot of really good ways that these little vehicles could help transit become much more attractive. When I go to another city, for example, and there's a little vehicle waiting for me to rent.

Sally Jessy Raphael just got her Smart Car-it was in the New York Times the other week. Well, these cars by Daimler-Chrysler are perceived as being too small. And if the public believes things aren't safe, they won't be safe and in this litigious society, no one will really want to come forward with a product offering.

I once had the Hewlett-Packard people say, "Are these things safe?" I said, "Come on-you people could put little bugs in the eyes of the streets in the neighborhoods just to slow down traffic, if you wanted to." So I think for this stuff to really roll out, you're going to have to approach communities in that kind of a way, of trying to foster a safe way of getting about. Hence the need for convergent media and all the kinds of ways to get people excited.

3. Some hardware and software design-how frogdesign mixes UI design together with industrial design, and how is that changing. Deployment is essentially: how do you market this and how do you do it? If I had a chance, I'd love to have a little GPS on me, and I could pick up a screen, or whatever and see where I was on the earth-live, real time, and with a perspective on what it really is. I mean, all of our foundations are built on wonder, on possibilities, on who knows what? And it seems like a really incredibly exciting and wonderful time for us to rethink how we all live on this magical ball in space. It sounds very utopian-and maybe it is-but utopia is a destination, and we may not ever get there, but at least we'll get to a better place along the way. So that's the important part about all of this.

Back to the cars. Smart is doing great stuff with marketing in Europe with its little Smart Cars. I love it, and I wish it could be here, but again, I've just talked about the issues surrounding the small vehicles. You've got to go inside the brain, really. So I'd been working, before I even joined up with frog two years ago, on educational characters, programs, outreach, all kinds of different ways to involve communities, kids, parents, families, commuters, whatever. The little cars look like they belong to a planet that doesn't exist. They show up, and the kids love them. Lots of the adults love them. Some of the serious, heavy-duty Mustang owners don't want to look at them-but that's okay, it doesn't have to be everybody. But these little cars are like, destination: Happy Planet. I think the kids really get that. Instead of just going out somewhere with a kiosk, we're going out there with something that's physical, real, compelling-for kids, at least, at that age.

I've spent eight to ten years with the kids, and the kids are just really great. When I went down to Disney's town, Celebration, I did these little seminars for these kids, and this one kid, a little ten year old said to me, "I have an idea about how I want to design my own little neighborhood car." So I said, "What's your idea?" She said, "Well, I want to get rid of those accelerator pedals and put them up on the steering controls." And I said, ÔWell, we can do that. We make handicapped vehicles like that. But why don't you want to do it on the floor?" She said, "That's where I want my foot massagers." You could take a thousand designers from General Motors, and they won't come up with that.

So it's a new age, and these companies have the opportunity to rethink everything entirely.

For about six years, Frog has been getting into digital media. As an industrial design company, it started to look at how to bring hardware and software together, perhaps before many others.

Ford called us ten weeks away from the auto show. They had what was basically just a car exterior designed-no interior, no showpieces for the auto show or anything. We brought a lot of communication tools to it-a GPS, a friend-finder. You push the top button and ask where your friend Sally is-and it will tell you about where, but not exactly. It's kind of fun. And then there's a web radio. Then we had to do industrial design, like seats that could rotate, and they had to have kind of a non-car feel.

I think the other part of the story here is about divergence. It's about where convergence happens and where you can go from there. And I think that's the exciting, colorful, big story part.