Don't Underestimate the Scooters on the Street: They Hold the Future of Human Transport

The scooter is not a bug in the city. It grew out of the way people adapted to the demands of urban life. Now that "transport" has become "mobility," what do these small vehicles mean?

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"I just really like electric motorcycles. In China they're especially practical: they're electric, and they're easy to repair. Sure, a small motorcycle isn't something you'd show off, but it really is useful."

Designer Rainer Wessler has long been interested in motorcycles. He and his colleagues went to Shanghai, China, and Phnom Penh, Cambodia, to watch how small business owners in different trades modify and use their motorcycles. They wanted to answer one question: how does the motorcycle keep these people's small businesses running, and how has it come to play such an important part in their family lives?

Wessler works for the innovation consultancy frog, where he is executive creative director of the Shanghai studio. frog is a multinational design and strategy consultancy. Besides designing products and services, it sets its in-house designers, technologists and strategists to research industry trends, new technologies and global consumer culture, and publishes the findings regularly. Its latest round of research centers on personal transport and offers carmakers and (electric) motorcycle makers solutions suited to the changes underway.

The work of Wessler's team is an important part of that research. He eventually published an article titled Hacking the E-Moto, which explores how people put their imagination to work on electric motorcycles.

Motorcycles are used in many different ways; in San Francisco, the rental provider Scoot Networks rents out electric scooters

In Asia, people modify motorcycles into different forms to suit their (business) needs

Today's modification will be tomorrow's product

The article deals with things we see every day and take for granted.

Small traders, for example, use the electric motorcycle as a studio or mobile office. Someone in the home renovation trade (drilling, carpentry, painting and so on) might fit his e-bike with a wooden platform, ropes and rubber tires to hold and secure his tools: electric drills, buckets, hoses, brushes.

At the street stalls we all know, the electric motorcycle serves as both warehouse and shop. A single motorcycle can carry an awning, shelves, a shop sign, even a kitchen counter. Cargo models, once modified, get longer and sturdier racks, so couriers and delivery workers can carry as many parcels as possible and still weave steadily through the city.

After observing these traders and interviewing them, the frog team found that these self-employed owners, whatever their trade, are quick to spot a business opportunity. They make the electric motorcycle a core part of the business: the place where sales happen, or where goods and equipment are stored and displayed, not just a way to get around.

A renovation worker has turned it into his office

Expanding an electric motorcycle's capacity

The equipment a small stall built on a motorcycle carries

To ordinary people like you and me, all this looks plain and unremarkable. But step back and look at it in the abstract, and you see what it tells us about where transport is heading.

It means Asian cities have already built a "modifiable" ecosystem around the electric motorcycle. The motorcycle has become an open platform that people can modify, a product open to bottom-up customization. That makes it a good local transport solution, and a business opportunity as well.

The transport and auto industries as a whole can learn something from the modified electric motorcycle: "Today's modification will be tomorrow's product. What now looks like a fairly casual activity can become a lasting, sustainable relationship between industry, people and business."

Motorcycles still have plenty of room to be modified and developed further. frog's research suggests they might one day carry equipment for investment and wealth management, or for first aid

We are moving from "driving" to "mobility"

In a conversation with QDaily, Wessler took up the most hotly debated topic in the future of transport: driverless (and self-driving) cars. Carmakers, internet companies and chipmakers are all experimenting with this new kind of vehicle in one way or another. As a designer, Wessler is both a participant in the auto industry and an observer of it. In his view, before driverless cars go into mass production and become part of daily life, the question that most needs settling is "trust": people's trust in a tool.

He cited a Volvo self-parking accident. In May 2015, a video spread online of a Volvo XC60 in a self-parking accident. The car was reversing into a parking space, perhaps to test Volvo's automatic emergency braking. Several people stood facing it. As the software backed the car toward them, they had plenty of time to step aside, but none of them moved. Nor did the car stop at any point. It knocked them down.

"Strange, isn't it? They just stood there and watched it happen. They trusted the software completely and assumed the car would stop. The problem is that the software didn't stop the car. What's worse, the software had that function. It knew how to stop the car, but the function was never activated."

Wessler argues that when something like this happens, we should discuss more than how to improve the software and the car, or how the carmaker protects its reputation. We also need to teach people when to trust the machine and when not to, and which responsibilities are theirs and which are not. Society should set up some mechanism to deal with the accidents that may occur.

Look at driverless cars in terms of ownership (in the abstract sense, which also means a person's control over the car), and drivers will first have to go through a period of learning to "let go": to trust their own cars and stop thinking of themselves as the car's "master." Designers, for their part, have to ask: "How do I convince drivers that a car driving itself can be as good as a human driver, or even better?"

In the city of the future, with driverless cars filling the streets, we may at last be able to use urban resources and space more freely and efficiently. That is the hopeful vision many people share. But for now, at least, "how to regulate driverless cars," "how to protect users' privacy and safety" and "who is liable when an accident happens" all need more debate, and even a positive word like "trust" hides some worries.

Google's driverless car

Baidu's driverless car on a road test in Beijing last December

City traffic today still has plenty of problems, especially in densely populated Asian cities. There are too many vehicles and too much congestion; roads as planned may be unsuited to cars; and there are too few parking spaces. That last point ties into a problem urban planners face all over the world: much of the city's space is taken up by cars that aren't moving.

Meanwhile, the transport industry itself is changing fast and drastically.

Wessler says we are now moving from "driving" to "mobility." In the past we "drove" from one place to another. In the future, getting from A to B may be less a matter of "driving" a car than of sitting in a moving space where, besides being "on the road," we can do other things too.

Strip away speed, and a vehicle is, at heart, a moving space. We can already see the trend. "Speed," "escape" and "the road trip adventure" are things only racing drivers and a few enthusiasts still care about; what most drivers actually want from a car is the convenience of getting around.

Here lies one of the carmakers' biggest challenges. When people talk about cars, they no longer talk only about driving; they have more stories to tell. Yet most carmakers spent more than a century building their brands, and most of the brand image and capabilities they have built are tied to driving alone.

When you get into a car in the future, what experience will you have?

Carmakers can't yet answer that question.

Recall the lesson the modified motorcycle holds for the transport industry: cars should become open systems. Follow that thought. If cars, too, were designed as open systems with more room for "modification," carmakers would gain a much larger source of innovation to draw on.

Some companies are already doing this: Tesla has announced that it is opening all its patents to the whole industry. Most carmakers, though, probably won't open up completely; they are more likely to choose open collaboration. Wessler gave a few examples. "Imagine BMW starting to work with the Swiss furniture company Vitra to design a living room together. Or working with Muji to turn the BMW into a better office, or whatever it is, anyway a better space."

Turn it around, and cars may one day become commercial spaces for companies like Muji, Vitra, IKEA, even Gucci. Companies that understand how people live, how they work and how they look for fun might use the car as a "place" to offer distinctive experiences.

Muji's show home, the "Vertical House." Perhaps one day its business will extend from housing into mobility

In 2015, IKEA set up the research center Space 10, hoping to find ways to improve city dwellers' living conditions and health through many innovative experiments and prototype tests

In fact, the auto industry is redefining "mobility." Wessler believes that in the future, carmakers will see mobility not as a collection of vehicles, but as a broad service.

Say you are a paying customer of a company. It promises to get you from A to B on time and safely, by whatever means. Or one brand promises to get you somewhere in the shortest possible time; another says you will travel in the greatest luxury; a third says its service is the most fun, because its cars have a great club on board.

"I think 'mobility as a service' is the future of this industry. For carmakers, the car is not the only business opportunity through which they can sell their values," Wessler concluded.

It is reasonable to imagine that decades from now, getting from A to B will be more about living, working and playing. Today we have cars, homes (houses) and offices; in the future, the car may be an extension of all of them. Once technology has advanced far enough, cars need not look like today's cars, and people will be able to define the size and shape of a moving space more freely. There may well come a day with fewer cars on the street, because we will have learned to use vehicles more sensibly and better services will have cut the time we spend commuting.

What will happen to city planning?

Uber, which we all know, and China's many ride-hailing apps have already set some new rules. They show that new business models are emerging in transport. They have given us a fresh, firsthand feel for the sharing economy, and they have changed how people get around and live in cities.

For urban planning and design, a New York Times story about how a self-driving car experiences the city is instructive. The ScanLAB project it describes uses the electronic eyes of a driverless car to make 3D scans and maps of London. The project holds that humans are no longer alone in perceiving and experiencing the modern landscape: something else is there with us, seeing through the built environment in an entirely different and essentially non-human way.

In other words, a driverless car carries several kinds of sensors, while a city is full of complex building shapes, reflective surfaces of every sort, unpredictable weather and temporary construction sites. If a building's facade reflects badly and sets off (or fails to set off) one of the car's sensors, it could cause an accident.

Designers, architects and urban planners must think not only about how people will experience their designs in the future, but also about how vehicles will experience them. In this sense alone, changes in transport are already reshaping our cities.

The ScanLAB project uses the electronic eyes of a driverless car to make 3D scans and maps of London

Wessler believes the biggest challenge for the city of the future is to find fair, democratic ways to use and share out the resources we have (space, education, healthcare, security, clean water and air, energy), instead of letting masses of parked cars take over the city, as they do now. In theory, there could be more living space and less parking space. Living might no longer happen only in houses, and the car would become a place where more stories unfold. There would also be better systems to plan and manage all these resources.

Airbnb has brought a welcome change. It stands for a new business model and may well mark the start of a change in how people will live. In the end the brand says just one thing: "Anywhere can be your home." The trend that comes with it is that people are becoming more and more global and may go back less and less to their hometowns and home countries. The part "home" plays in our sense of who we are will change completely.

Wessler cited a German media report about a young woman who lived on trains. She gave up her apartment and moved onto public transport. She felt that life on board already met her needs: she could rent a bed and had a passable bathroom.

This was only an experiment, but Wessler believes it is a useful case of a nomadic way of life that can push our thinking further. We don't know how people's lives will change. Designers, journalists and you, the reader, are all a very small slice of humanity. People at the bottom of the pyramid (such as refugees who have migrated to Europe) and people at the top who travel constantly will all live rather different lives, now and in the future.

"No single model suits everyone, so the cities of the future will have many different models. People will still have homes of their own, but more people will also choose to share homes and share cars. The good news is that cities will meet more people's needs with less energy," Wessler said.

Cover image sources: inhabitat, wallpaperbeta

Some images in this article were provided by frog;

the rest come from inhabitat, creativepool, nytimes, theverge, gizmodo, Ifeng