Collective Mobility Assistant: a self-driving service for small and medium-sized enterprises in a local community

The first fully autonomous vehicles of Ford will be launched in 2021, and the revolution has been carried out not only self-driving technologies but also new business models. I.e., the establishment of Ford Smart Mobility LLC has demonstrated its ambition to seek new mobility business models rather than a focus on manufacturing vehicles itself. Hereby, Ford has partnered with Lyft and Domino's to seize opportunities of self-driving cars with regard to ride-hailing and on-demand delivery services. Meanwhile, Ford evinced a burning interest of applying autonomous vehicles in logistics field in the 2018 Consumer Electronics Show. As a result, the design direction of logistics/delivery was decided. Future-oriented products such as autonomous cars, are ideal to plan and develop by a top-down approach. However, the approach is lacking of the voices from small and medium-sized companies, local organizations, and regional communities. Therefore, it is an opportunity for Ford to build up an autonomous mobility service by a bottom-up approach which empowers SMEs and local residents to customize the transits according to their needs. And so, the challenge of this project is "sensing logistics opportunities from SMEs to form a service model as a local initiative by means of autonomous vehicles of Ford". The double diamond design process was adopted to guide through this project. It started from a research phase to seize design insights, and then come up with design concepts based on the findings. In order to response to the challenge, the design methods of in-depth interview and future workshop were adopted to come up with design concepts via a bottom-up mindset. Ultimately, twelve interviewees had participated, they are business owners, delivery drivers, logistics stuffs, and logistics and transportation professors. The findings of the interviews were summarized as four case studies and twelve design directions. The cases cover from delivery types of business-to-business, business-to-consumer, and a small delivery company. In addition, the twelve design directions demonstrated the need and the want regarding to logistics in SMEs. Namely, information, companies, social value a network, best planning, delivery, interaction, and supply chain. The design directions illustrated the current needs of SMEs, and the future workshop supplemented the expectations of autonomous vehicles from a perspective of community. Totally twenty-four expectations were generated from the future workshop. In the end, initial design concepts were come up with the integration of the twelve design directions and the twenty-four expectations. Collective Mobility Assistant, the final design concept, is a burden free autonomous mobility platform for SMEs/local residents. It offers four types of mobility: Delivery, Transit, Tour, and Event, which enables SMEs/local residents to transport goods or people according to their needs. Alternatively, the platform can be used as open space for people to contribute their personal skills for the communities. The autonomous mobility service offered by Ford invites more people to join the platform without worrying about the moving issue. The value of Collective Mobility Assistant matches the brand values of Ford "people serving people" and "commitments to the community".