The class will explore the design of future urban transportation services focusing on shared autonomous vehicles and their user experience. Throughout the course, students will learn how to apply a variety of service design approaches and human-centered techniques to sketch credible future scenarios for emerging technologies, hypothesize challenges in their user experience, and design solutions for them.

As the percentage of the world’s population residing in urban areas continues to increase steadily, the challenge of designing and building urban transportation services that are sustainable and efficient is becoming essential. Following current research, the class will learn about the evolutionary trends of urban mass transportation. Students will survey research focusing on the essential role that shared autonomous vehicles can play in a sustainable future for urban transportation. In the first part of the course, students will review emerging technologies, such as autonomous driving, and emerging consumer behaviors, such as car-hailing and ride-sharing, to extrapolate a coherent representation of a possible future for urban transportation. Primary or secondary research approaches may be applied in this phase.

The initial future scenario building exercise will serve as the backdrop for envisioning the journey of future users of shared autonomous vehicles and the service organizations that will deliver them. In this phase, students will work towards identifying specific challenges in the user journey. How do users solicit a vehicle? How do they establish the meeting point? How do they recognize the specific vehicle they booked? How do they communicate with the driverless vehicle? How do they negotiate the physical boundaries with other occupants? How do they pay for their ride? These are examples of the questions that the user journey of shared autonomous vehicles will illuminate.

The second part of the class will be dedicated to ideating, designing, and prototyping potential solutions to the questions identified in the first part. Students will choose which specific challenges in the user journey of shared autonomous vehicles they intend to address. In collaboration with the instructor, students will follow a typical design concept development process to envision solutions for the chosen challenges. From structured brainstorming activities, to concept sketching and down-selection, to detailed design and prototyping, the instructor will help students move through the different phases of product development. At the end of the course, students will have developed an understanding of the role of digital technology in urban mobility and a familiarity with innovation approaches based on future scenarios and ideation.