How will the future make mobility smarter? Interview with Eric Hale, speaker at EICS 2020
By: Manfredi Domina
Tags: Emerging Technology, Smart Tourism, Smart Cities, City Planning, Design Thinking

Technology and mobility, technology and tourism, technology and environmental sustainability. Technology is increasingly being involved in the future of many different industries, connecting them in an extraordinary way.

That’s why we need to stop talking about emerging technologies as a whole. We need to start to discuss how emerging technologies will have a role in different industries, and in the companies belonging to those sectors.

The European Summit of Emerging Technologies, 2019.

That’s our mission at EICS 2020.

The third edition of the European Summit of Emerging Technologies will be memorable. We’re working hard to let you ‘TRY — LEARN & DISCOVER’ everything related to emerging technologies and their applications in specific sectors. We want to help managers and entrepreneurs to understand the role of those cutting-edge technologies learning to innovate projects in 3 ways: try on demos and new devices to understand what emerging is about, putting their hands in innovation design-lead process with practical workshops and getting inspired by international case studies.

Are you joining us in Milan on 25–26 March 2020?

Is the goal of future mobility to be sustainable?

The combination of technology with mobility, tourism and sustainability creates a new important topic “sustainable mobility”, becoming increasingly necessary as a tireless engine of the unstoppable technological revolution we’ve been living in.

If it’s true that sustainable mobility can be studied and discussed through immersive technologies such as virtual reality, then we are investigating an issue of extraordinary importance with the technological tools that are available for us now and tomorrow.

And that’s why the future of sustainable mobility studied through immersive technologies is the main topic of one of the workshops at EICS 2020.

On March 26th from 10:30 am to 1:30 pm at LA Village of Credit Agricole there will be a workshop focused on smart mobility in which participants will learn in which direction immersive technologies aimed to make mobility more sustainable are moving to.

In a team of 4 to 6 people, participants will work together to solve design problems related to mobility. What does it mean making mobility sustainable? What will be the needs of the people and our future cities moving fast towards just another technological revolution thanks to emerging technology?

The keywords here are team working and Design Thinking.

The workshop facilitator will be Eric Hale, Design Director at Uqido, an Italian engineering and consultancy company specialized in software development and immersive computing.

Subscribing this workshop will allow everyone to have an extraordinary overview of the technological aspects related to mobility. By learning or refining the “design thinking” companies will learn how to approach and solve problems and finally, having the chance to making the world a better place thanks to potentially disruptive solutions that can be designed and developed by the workshop participants in the future.

It’s a design-based procedure you can learn and implement everywhere!

Eric Hale and his vision of having a sustainable future

I had the opportunity to ask Eric, a visionary and multifaceted man, some questions.

Eric Hale, workshop speaker and facilitator at EICS 2020

He explained to me a wonderful way to approach people’s problems.

Eric sees those problems as puzzles to solve, imagining them as connections to be created through design and technology.

The vision of this professional who at the age of five had Leonardo Da Vinci as an idol is to design a workshop to allow the participants to roll up their sleeves and learn a method of planning-oriented strategic thinking, understanding new tools and getting methodologies in a very pragmatic and practical way.

I asked Eric how he sees the future of Smart Mobility technologies in the next 3–5 years.

Eric imagines a change driven by new mobility that aims to eliminate traffic as we know it. The scenarios he has allowed me to imagine are extraordinary and futuristic. From the car with automatic driving to the centralized organization of traffic resulting in the railway like the efficiency of moving cars, continuing to a paradigm shift where the car owner doesn’t need to be human, after all.

Who knows what will happen? None. But we can have a glimpse on the consequence of this new scenario, which will be about redesigning our cities, our spaces, our daily habits and eliminate parking, giving way to parks and green areas.

Eric tells me about different cities, such as San Francisco, where technology is making an impact as currently dedicate roughly 75% to 80% of the city’s space to moving and parking cars. This is actually very inefficient and wasteful. What if we could cut down on excessive parking requirements or boost mass transit and free up land for development? A recent report from the Rocky Mountain Institute argued that the era of private car ownership may peak within a decade, as new networks of shared, electric, possibly autonomous vehicles become cheaper. How can cities be redesigned accordingly? San Francisco sketched out a forward-looking plan to take advantage of these new transportation options and shrink the amount of space devoted to cars. With smaller streets and fewer parking spots, the city would have more land to work with — to build more affordable housing.

And we all, thanks to Eric and people like him, will start believing in this more and more, as we understand how design processes can make these visions real and ready for the future that is not very far away anymore.