Projects

Urban Moments

Urban Moments is a service, encouraging citizens to walk as part of their commute, while staying healthy and exploring local shops in the city. It helps public transportation providers to reduce overcrowding on their network during peak-times, mostly caused by commuters travelling to and from work.

Holistic

STUDENTS INVOLVED

Jae Sun Park

Sujeban Susilakanthan

ABOUT

Visa

Improving Urban Mobility

Public transportation in urban environments is often overcrowded and congested during peak-hours as commuters travel to and from work. Transport providers are increasingly facing difficulties with their demand management. As a result, this creates more discomfort and anxiety for passengers. How might we encourage people to walk or cycle during peak-hours in order to reduce demand on the public transportation network?

Problems & Opportunities

Public transportation in cities is often overcrowded during peak hours since work commuters travel in and out of central London. There is a correlation between the typical working hours of 9 to 5 and the two peaks during the day. Transport providers are increasingly facing difficulties with their demand management. This creates more discomfort and anxiety for passengers. The Mayor's aim by 2041 is that every Londoner achieves at least two, 10 minute periods of active travel during the day because Londoners are not active enough and are at risk of obesity and other health issues. London would benefit a lot from citizens walking just 20 minutes a day. Especially in health, £1.6 billion could be saved in NHS healthcare costs. Environmentally, 57kg of carbon could be saved per year. It would also help the local economy, knowing that people who walk spend 40% more in town centres than car drivers.

Archetypes

We looked at different types of work commuters and segmented them by the following 3 parameters: Time-rich / Time-poor, More transport options / Fewer transport options, Price-sensitive / Less price-sensitive. We identified 8 different archetypes and prioritised those who are more time-rich as they are the ones who are more flexible so they could delay their arrival home, who have more transportation options because they would have the choice to walk or cycle and who are quite price-sensitive because they are the ones that would not take public transportation during peak times if it meant they could reduce their travel spending. Urban Moments is initially designed for professionals for whom the concept of getting home on time doesn’t exist. Also, for people who like to try new things and are always on the lookout for new places to explore.

Key Considerations

One of the key considerations we followed in this project is to align our concept to Visa’s current mission which is to support local businesses. Urban Moments works as a platform for local brick-and-mortar shops to attract more and new customers. Having understood the way Visa operates, develops and delivers solutions, we needed to enable other players in the urban mobility ecosystem rather than directly intervening as a payment technology company. Urban Moments is designed for the public transport provider and the city government. Visa plays an orchestrating role between the city, the transport provider, local shops and the citizens. Covid-19 being the inevitable context of the project we speculated and envisioned its effects on urban mobility and our proposition since human expectations will probably change after this pandemic.

A remote Service Design Project

Due to Covid-19 and its associated lockdown and safety measures, we had to quickly adapt to remote ways of working and collaborating in this project. This included rapidly developing remote facilitation skills using Miro and Zoom, running virtual discoveries, workshops, coming up with creative ways of prototyping urban mobility in times of lockdown and testing propositions and also having project tutorials with experts, local shops, potential users and our tutors. Working mainly across 3 different time zones - UK, Germany and South Korea - we had to establish new rituals and efficient ways of collaborating and communicating. In this project, we had the opportunity to collaborate and validate our proposition with some of the most senior experts at Visa. We have developed valuable creative and relational skills in running a project of such magnitude and have grown enormously as designers through these times of uncertainty.

special thanks

Elin Sjursen - Senior Design Strategy Director at Visa; Neal Stone - our Tutor; Dr. Luke Roberts; Design, Business and Technology experts from Visa and all other professionals and participants in our workshop, prototyping and testing activities.

Projects

Urban Moments

Problems & Opportunities

Archetypes

students involved on the project