With more than half of the world’s population moving to urban areas, building a city transportation system can be chaotic. In an effort to help the world improve through better mobility, Ford partnered with Vectorform to build the foundation for their Ford City Insights Platform – a tool that allows cities to easily visualize and understand their entire transportation system so they can make better decisions for their communities today and in the future.

Goals

Bring to life a big vision for smarter mobility planning

In early 2018, Ford president and CEO Jim Hackett talked about a "mobility operating system." City Insights is the evolution of this vision, a system where all things related to mobility work seamlessly together to make city planning smarter, better, and more efficient.

Leverage digital twin models to solve mobility problems

Use deep real-world data sources to answer crucial questions that city officials face, such as “are there enough parking spaces in town?”

Prove platform success through pilot launch

Build a platform foundation using the city of Ann Arbor, Michigan as a pilot. If proven successful, the solution would span to six other cities to solve urban driving problems.

Results

Following successful tests with Ann Arbor, the platform is expanding to six more U.S. cities: Austin, Indianapolis, Miami, Pittsburgh, Detroit, and Grand Rapids.

This suite of advanced software tools allows cities to explore and help solve a variety of mobility issues in a dynamic way not offered before.

Brett Wheatley, Vice President, Mobility Marketing and Growth, Ford Motor Company

Unite physical and digital tools

Unique opportunities to learn and collaborate were opened up by leveraging a physical, large-scale, 3D printed city on top of high-definition displays. This physical display was connected to a fully interactive 3D touchscreen and tablet controller that triggered a variety of transportation simulations.

Integrate a variety of transportation simulations

The physical/digital experience is powered by an aggregate of transportation data models to simulate shared mobility and autonomous vehicle impacts, as well as forecasting community needs for aging populations within the City of Ann Arbor, MI.

Designed and built for longevity

With repurpose and reuse in mind, the physical buildout of Ford City Insights’ 3D display was designed and built to work for multiple configurations and sizes when spanning to cities beyond Ann Arbor. Additionally, the hundreds of 3D printed buildings were printed and assembled with easy setup in mind.

As cities undergo a transformation to their mobility eco-system, the automotive manufacturers are transforming to mobility providers.  Ford is bringing all stakeholders together to collaborate within an easy-to-use, data-driven environment to drive new opportunities and find better ways to make cities safe, livable, and accessible.

Roles

  • Strategy and Planning
  • User Experience Design
  • User Interface Design
  • Industrial Design
  • Realtime, Procedural Design
  • Installation (Desktop) Engineering
  • Mobile Engineering
  • Quality Assurance
  • Project Management

Deliverables

  • Data Visualization Design
  • UX/UI interface Design
  • Storyboard & Script Writing
  • Physical Installation
  • Deployment for Windows
  • Deployment for iOS

Concentrations

Read about Ford City Insights in Car and Driver

“Ford Using Artificial Intelligence to Solve Urban Driving Problems” - Ford City Insights turns traffic, parking, and police data into algorithms to figure out how to optimize daily driving.

Read the article

 

Work

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