Transcriber: Minru (May) Wang Reviewer: Zihan Zhao-Holland
7 am, Monday, on a freeway in Los Angeles,
A driver makes a last-second dash for the exit ramp,
cutting across 3 or 4 lanes of traffic.
Two cars have to brake really hard
to avoid hitting it.
This causes a tailback,
a chain reaction of braking,
until 20 cars behind.
Somebody perhaps not paying attention,
or tailgating, or both,
rear-ends the vehicle in the front.
Nobody is hurt,
but the two vehicles rolled to a halt,
and the vehicles in the lane behind
also grind to a halt as well.
Then they try to peel off
to the lane to the left and to the right
to get around the obstacle,
and before we know it,
like an areterial thrombosis,
we have a two-mile tailback,
and one of those sig-alerts that
we dread hearing on our morning commute.
Unfortunately, I am at the back
of that two-mile tailback.
I'm on my way to LAX Airport
for a flight to the Bay Area
for a business meeting.
And now I'm really stressed.
I'm in danger of missing my flight.
There's nothing I can do about it.
I just sit there, grind my teeth, and hope
that I'm going to get to the airport in time.
Eventually I do get to the airport,
where I have to
leave my car in a dingy parking lot,
take a smelly elevator down
to the ground floor,
where, with some difficulty,
I clamber up into an archaic shuttle bus,
which takes me to the chaos of the airport terminal.
And I'm not even going to show you
the inhumanity and suffering
that goes along through
check-in, security, and then,
elbowing my way onto a crowded airplane,
(Laughter)
because I'm sure
you are already too familiar with it yourselves.
Needless to say,
when we landed the other end,
and I check out my rental car,
it spank into the slow, crawling grind
of freeway traffic again,
only this time, in the Bay Area.
(Laughter)
Eventually I do get to my appointment on time,
but I'm tired; I'm stressed;
and frankly I don't really feel like doing business anymore.
So this sounds like "chaos theory".
Well, it is,
and we need to banish chaos theory
from our transportation.
It's too stressful.
It's too uncertain.
And it's 2015.
We really need to do a much better job
than we are.
And here's another reason
why we need to do a better job
of our future transportation.
This planet of ours, Earth,
is this wonderful, amazing, beautiful,
self-organizing, self-balancing ecosystem.
And in the last few hundred years alone,
mankind has succeeded
in dangerously unbalancing this system
to the point where our very existence is under threat.
This is the real reason
why we need to radically rethink
and remap our transportation systems.
But we are on the cusp
of exciting developments.
Technology is rapidly bringing us
automation to our transportation -
our trains, our trucks, and our automobiles.
And automation has the possibility
of removing chaos from our transportation
by removing that unpredictaible human element.
If we look at the jigsaw puzzle
of transportation that we have today,
there are clearly some missing pieces.
And I have spent my career professionally,
and in my teaching, trying to identify
what those missing pieces are.
And I've come to the conclusion
that there is one particularly crucial missing piece,
which I am going to explain to you,
and that the root-most importantly of this missing piece
is the fundmatmentals of design process.
But first, I want to talk to you
about a couple of challenges that we have.
If you look at the modes of transport
that we are familiar with today -
railroads, shipping, aviation, the automobile -
these industries all started
from a different point in history.
They've evolved into
their own unique cultures,
industrial cultures,
and their silent cultures.
Their cultures which regard each other suspiciously,
and those "competitors" rather than "collaborators".
They are tired industries.
they are from the 19th century and the 20th century,
and we are looking at the 21st century.
A political system that's tired,
and some people would say it's broken,
which means, unfortunately,
that we are left with
19th century and 20th century infrastructure to deal with.
But then, if we do get a chance to
develop a new transportation system,
there are lots and lots of different stakeholders involved.
There are politicians;
there are government agencies;
there are engineers;
there are lobbyists...
Just to name a fraction of them.
They all squabble.
They all have competing agendas.
So you only have to look at, for instance,
the high-speed-rail initiative in California
to understand how having
stakeholders that can't agree on it with each other
is very much hindering our progress.
And, by the way,
who is the most important stakeholder of all?
It's us, the end user.
And when was the last time anybody asked you
what your needs and aspirations were
for a high speed connection
between Northern and Southern California?
What we'd really need,
is a grand, unifiying, system
for the design of our transportation systems,
and for the end result.
I've been asking myself:
what would happen
if we design transportation for the future
using a collaborative process
rather than in an exercise of combat.
I've been looking at other fields and other industries
to see where there might be
collaborative processes for coming up with solutions,
and it turns out that there are.
And a really good example
is from our friends, Eric JPL,
who used an extreme collaboration process called Team X
to design the complex space machines that you've just seen.
And they do it repeatedly.
And they do it really successfully.
I've also looked at the design processes
that we use when we are designing,
and what all happens
if we can expand these processes
from just designing products, or services,
or experiences,
and expand them to designing
complex transportation systems in the future.
Putting all of these things together,
I realize that there was this one critical missing piece
to developing and remapping our transportation systems,
and it is the collaborative process.
So I'm going to explain to you
how I believe that this process works
based on what I've learned
from the likes of JPL.
Imagine, if you will,
a transportation project
which is being planned by, say, a state,
or a regional or city government, city agency.
Before this agency even dares to start arguing
about whether it's going to include
bus rapid transit, or subways, or hyperloops,
or whatever it is,
what they need to do,
is to assemble a small team of experts
in transportation and related fields
who I will call the "core vision team".
And the design and designers
will be the core of this core vision team.
They task, though,
will not be to design the solutions,
but it will be to do what designers instinctively do
whenever they start a new project,
and that is to frame up the problem,
to really establish
what the goals of this system are going to be;
do appropriate future studies
so that they can understand
what the probable futures are
that this system is going to live in.
And then identify all of the stakeholders
that will need to be involved -
and of course,
especially the most important stakeholders,
which is us, the end users.
And then they are going to establish
what the performance standards will be for this system.
No solutions, but framing it all out.
Their next job will be to identify,
from around the world or around the country,
experts to represent
each of those stakeholders that they've identified.
And these experts have to be highly regarded in their field,
and they have to have the experience
to be able to make extremely important decisions
on behalf of their stakeholders that they represent.
I'm going to call this the "concept team".
And the reason that
these concept team members
are going to have to be able to
make important decisions, and also under pressure,
is because they are going to be asked to participate
in an extreme collaboration process.
This process will be about a 1-week event
where they'll be convened and facilitated
by the expert moderator.
They'll be put through
an iterative process of intense discussions,
intense collaborative processes,
breakout sessions,
working by themselves very hard,
and they each will have a work station which is highly networked,
so that everybody can share information.
And they'll have, around the walls,
some smart boards, so that
there they can see the progress they make.
And it might sound like a rather chaotic process,
but the secret is actually in the moderation.
So, the beauty of this,
if we can design transportation systems
using these collaborative processes,
we end up with something that we don't have now,
and that is, we get agreement across all the stakeholders,
about how the process, and how the system is going to work.
And once we've got that agreement,
we can move forward with everybody agreeing,
as opposed to today,
where everybody's at each other's throats.
I mentioned
that this is a huge opportunity for the design community,
and here's the reason:
the process that I've described
is actually the process that we use in design every day,
but on steroids.
So designers need to be all over this process.
Also, designers are very good at working across different disciplines;
we are good
at translating the language of one discipline to another.
Also, designers are very good at visualizing the facts,
the data, the ideas, and the concepts
that come out of these sections in a format which
the eventual important decision makers can understand
even though they are not subject experts themselves.
So, what happes if we were able to
put these processes into a fact,
how would that affect my journey to the Bay Area
in, say, 2030?
Well, in 2030, I believe I won't own a car anymore -
well, at least not my everyday car.
Instead, I will subscribe monthly
to what I will call a "total mobility package".
And this total mobility package means
that I pay according to
how much I want to pay each month;
I receive mobility credits,
and I can use these credits
to access all of the different transportation requirements I have
in a month.
So, a day before I make my trip to the Bay Area,
I log onto my total mobility package provider,
and start mapping out my journey:
where I have to be,
when I need to get there,
my preferred modes of transportation,
and, of course,
when I need to make the return trip.
Soon, an itinerary is sent back to me for my approval.
I read through it - it looks good,
and I accept it.
At 9 o'clock the next morning,
I get a message from my provider
to remind me that
in 15 minutes' time,
a car will come to my office,
and pick me up to take me to the airport.
Sure enough, at 9:15,
as get onto the sidewalk,
a sleek-looking, single-seat vehicle arrives at the curbside.
There is no driver, because this car can drive itself.
The door slides open,
and a voice greets me by name,
and I put my baggage in the space behind the seat.
I get in, and belt up.
Now, this vehicle is an object lesson
in being the right tool for the job.
It's big enough and comfortable enough
to take me and my baggage to the airfield,
but it's no bigger than it needs to be;
it uses no more resources than it has to,
no more energy to movement.
The right tool for the job.
Soon, we get into the LA traffic,
which, in 2030, is collaborative,
because it's largely automated.
And we smoothly and silently go to the airport.
However, we're not going to LAX, this time.
We are going to a small local airfield, El Monte,
which happens to be close to my office.
Threading our way through the traffic is a breeze,
and I can think about my journey, and not the driving.
When we arrive at the El Monte airport,
the car takes me directly
to a waiting airtaxi.
This is airtaxi, which is a battery-electric vehicle,
also is autonomous -
there is no pilot,
and there are two passengers already in it,
waiting to take off.
I slip my baggage into the cargo haul,
a green light informs me that
the weight of the baggage and the position is within the limits.
I get into the aircraft,
join my fellow passengers.
The door closes and locks behind me.
An aircraft inspector does a last-minute
pre-flight check,
and then we are on our way,
silently cruising up to the runway.
A few minutes later we are airborne,
and, 90 minutes later,
we are over San Francisco,
just before we land
at another local airfield
quite close to my final destination.
When I get out of the aircraft,
there, waiting for me
is an automated shuttle, sent to me
by the company that I'm visiting.
I climb in.
It greets me, confirms my appointments,
and then, 50 minutes later,
I've arrived at the corporate campus.
This time, I arrive refreshed,
relaxed, and ready to do business.
And, by the way,
this journey took just over 2.5 hours,
whereas in 2015 it took me nearly 7 hours.
So, I believe that if we go from
combat and chaos
to collaboration and connectivity,
we can achieve
these seamless kinds of transportation in the future.
Now, obviously, I've only been able
to touch the tip of the iceberg
in explaining this process to you
because of time,
but I do believe that
this crucial missing piece is the solution
to our seamless transportation
and remapping for the future, and
I really appreciate you listening to me.
Thank you so much.
(Applause)