- A City Is Not an App - Part 1
- A city is not an app. Like the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park, e-scooters bring both convenience and chaos to urban life. Mobility innovation companies must understand the lives and culture of city dwellers instead of viewing cities as blank canvases.
Continuing from Part 1...
So what are the alternatives?
The industry has missed opportunities to address the concerns and responsibilities regarding safety, productivity, and social connections that urban residents face when moving around the city—challenges they cannot solve on their own. Ultimately, the goal is to convince both the city and its residents.
To appeal to all of them, it's not enough to just have better brands or software. We need to understand the gaps between existing modes of transportation and consider how to fill those gaps where the city needs them.
In this regard, we suggest proposing two directions for self-development.
A. Human mobility: Mobility takes people where they want to spend their time. Investigating and understanding how these mobility cases are conducted and for what purpose, based on the city the industry is trying to enter, can be helpful.
- Why do people move around the city?
- How do people move around the city?
- Where do people move around the city?
This Human mobility culture can be the real software that allows us to understand the meaning of urban residents' mobility.
B. Technology: Changes in app functionality to match changes in the system can suggest socially acceptable functional improvements by first identifying the relationship that urban residents hope this easy and interesting movement will fill.
- What is a ‘reliable relationship’ between e-scooters and users?
Based on the ‘actor-network’ theory, which views things as beings that influence and are influenced by humans, it is possible to approach this as a human phenomenon.
This effort can become key to future government-led selection of limited companies, and it can become the basis of a survival strategy within the fiercely competitive industry, rather than an optional CSR activity.
Ryan Son is the partner at Reason of creativity, a social science-based consulting firm.
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