Imagine the future for urban developer in 2040
COMPANY
KONE
PRODUCT
Concept Design
Time
2022.09 - 2023.05
My Role
Researcher, designer
Overview
As one of the world's largest elevator companies, KONE has been innovating the industry by using IoT and AIto improve efficiency, sustainability and user experience in urban mobility solutions. Commisioned by KONE strategic foresight department, the challenge is to design a space for the urban developers in 2040.
KONE strategic foresight department collaborated with my team from Aalto university, using speculative design and strategy foresight methods to imagine the urban technologies in future scenarios. The final product was affirmed by KONE and will be put into their future strategy planning.
Project process
Discover
Stakeholder mapping
Literature research
User research
Define
Scenario workshop
Personas
Design
Co-create workshop
Storytelling
Deliver
VR prototype
Feedback collection
Stakeholder mapping
Literature research
Provided by KONE, the KIRA Real Estate and Construction Industry Report was studied as the background information resource. In the report, a lot of growth opportunities are mentioned, while we categoried them into three main topics below.
Green transition
The industry will realise the objective to reach climate-neutrality by 2035 and will switch to circular economy by 2030
Productivity and digitalization
The industry will digitize buildings and
processes to raise productivity and reduce waste
GREEN TRANSITION
The industry will improve customer experience as well as enable servitisation
User research
Having figured out our focuses, we conducted intervirews with 2 mechanical engineers from KONE in order to get more insights to know how KONE is acting to align with these industry trends.
For example, we asked:
What’s KONE reaction to the green shift?
What’s the main challenge for KONE to digitalize things?
How does the date improve the people flow?
Is there any other new trend that you notice?
...
And after that, we gathered some quotes from the transcripts and mapped them into the affinity diagram
Scenario building
After research phase, we started to build our future scenarios. We held a series of scenario building workshops onsite in KONE, in collaboration with the experts in the field.
The process of the workshops was made up of several professional methods of futurology study including weak signals, future wheels and futures cone, etc.
Weak signals are indicators of potentially emerging things that might become significant in the future, which can be used to highlight the future assumptions.
As the first step of the workshop, we scanned all the weak signals presented in the book Weak Signals 2022 published by Sitra. Then we analysed and categorized them into some main megatrends.
The Futures Wheel is way for envisioning the future consequences based on the current happening changes.
As the second step of the workshop, we used the canva of Futures Wheel to identify what potential consequences the megatrends would bring up in the future.
The Futures Cone is a concept used to represent a range of possible future scenarios and identify the levels of the uncertainty.
As the third step of the workshop, we mapped out the futures we got in the last session in the Futures Cone. And then we picked out the probable futures to build our final future scenarios.
The scenario we built for the future city is a place where:
1. Technological innovations overcome limitations in the availability of energy and high-quality data.
2. The mixed-use buildings become communities for people to live and work together.
3. Space becomes a service concept instead of a property.
...
Persona
To better understand how the future will change the way of work and living of urban developers, we then developed first-person narratives based on our imagined future scenarios.
We firstly created some charactors and wrote about their stories, then we conducted interviews to collect feedbacks from KONE experts.
Co-create workshop
To get more insights and perspectives from the future urban developers, we recruited 18 university students with expertise in architecture, engineering, urban planning and urban mobility. With them, we held several workshops to get inspirations of products.
The agenda of the workshop was devided into several steps, starting from scanning the weak signals to building the products in the scenarios.
Scanning
As the first step of the workshop, we asked the participants to scan all the materials including the weak signals, megatrends and the scenario canvas we built in the previous phases. While scanning, the participants were encouraged to take notes of the topic they felt interested.
What if?
After scanning all the information we provided, the participants were asked to propose What If questions to make hypotheses about the future world.
Examples:
Micro-scenario
In this step, the participants were asked to imagine a story in the first-person narrative, discribing in 2040 how will individuals live and feel, and what kind of challenge they may face.
Examples:
Crazy 8
In this step, we used the ideation tool Crazy 8 for participants to generate quick ideas that could solve the problem appeared in the scenarios they had created.
Product building
After getting a large amount of good ideas in the last step, the participants were asked to pick one of the most potential product to build. The details of the product were discribed and illustrated.
Examples:
The products designed were collected as the results of the co-create workshop. We got a lot of surprising inspirations from these students and merged some of them into our final delivery. KONE was also very excited to hear about the perspective from these game changers in the future.
Storytelling
To showcase how the megatrends would make changes to the way urban developers live and work, we wrote stories for the characters we created, which discribed a typical day in their life, starting from getting up in the morning to finishing work at night.
Prototype
After the stories were discussed with people from KONE and iterated with the real stories we heard from engineers from KONE, we started to build the prototype in VR. By doing so, the urban developers can experience our vision of 2040 in person and give us feedback.
Examples:
VR Meeting room
Sarah use the VR meeting room to present the building models to colleagues. They can manipulate them in real-time to get better understanding and communication. Sometimes she also use VR for training and demonstrating products
Digital twin
Eetu uses the big screen to check the dashboard of the digital twin. The digital twin can provide a comprehensive view of facility management, energy optimization, predictive maintenance, and environmental monitoring
Feedback collection
We had our scenarios, stories and VR prototype presented at KONE forsight sharing event, where experts from KONE shared insights about megatrends and the value of strategic foresight. They were engaged in projects centered around the Future of Urban Living 2040 and Future of Mobility 2040, our project served as a complementary addition to the overarching context.
We invited experts in various professions to experience our prototype and ask for feedback. They found that the our design aligned with current trends and had the potential to be realised in the future.
Pitch at KONE forsight sharing event
Reflection
It was a eye-opening journey to work with KONE strategic forsight team and pdp team from Aalto University. While I managed to use some of my skills as a UX designer in the whole process, new knowledge I learned about strategic foresight inspired me to leverage the power of design thinking to explore more possibilities.
Working on this project was like time traveling to the future, and I can’t wait to see how it will actually be like in 2040!