Company
KONE oy, SPARCS Network
Role
Service Design Lead
Year
2021
Team Members
1 Business Lead, 1 Project Manager, 2 R&D corporate advisors
Overview
Transportation is a leading contributor to the production of damaging greenhouse gases and it will only get worse as megacities grow and more people buy cars.
KONE, a people flow expert, was therefore seeking to expand their services in sustainable transportation. They wanted to understand the opportunities of future electric peer-to-peer mobility solutions and their business models on a community level. The pilot city for this project was Espoo, a rapidly advancing city in southern Finland. ​
Problem
My team's brief was to consult KONE oy, as a global leader in helping people move (from elevators to building security), on how they could tap into sustainable ride-sharing services that are facilitated on a community level, but are customisable to individual city needs.
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Specifically, for the city of Espoo, my team and I always considered three major factors: 1) It already had major hubs for innovation in AV (autonomous vehicles) /EV technology 2) Long extreme cold winters impact any implemented services 3) Its aim is to be a "15 minute city," where any services are easily accessible in under 15 minutes.
Context
A key part of developing a transportation service business model is to understand how vehicles are currently being utilized and where those behaviors can shift.
Vehicles are highly under utilized, especially in major city hubs with public transportation. Cost-effective and sustainable solutions that promote peer-to-peer sharing of vehicles have major opportunities, but come with contextual problems such as infrastructure, trust and ease of use issues.
Process
Working closely with the R&D team at Kone Oy, my team and I worked to map out key criteria. Before doing intensive stakeholder and user research I made field trip guides for us to get contextual cues from transportation in Espoo, the pilot city for the service. I ran 2 surveys to collect a larger diverse data pool in order to test my team's assumptions and get a key understanding of contextual pain-points for transportation in a very cold Nordic city. As opportunities started to emerge from the data, we developed our key user groups and ran user interviews and workshop focus groups to make the details come alive. ​​​
User Findings
From our research we were able to refine the key user problems impacting a future ride-sharing service, and key user needs to build for. ​
Results & Impact
My team and I delivered a full business model with use cases for a sustainable and functional Residential EV Management System. For the final delivery handoff, I was in charge of the visuals (story boards, & simulations), and storytelling direction (report & pitches).
This research has been used directly to develop pilot city advanced transportation initiatives across Europe, including Espoo. ​
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