At Granstudio we believe in a multi-mobile future where increasingly different types of vehicles and services enable and complement each other, allowing to address more successfully specific user needs and desires.

Layered context


We believe in a future with an increasing amount of diverse vehicles, each of them better suited for a specific task and context. Small and smart shared vehicles in the city center, comfortable auto-driven cars on the highway, autonomous trains for long distance and the pure sports car for the occasional reconnection with the fun to drive. In this vision our Mobjects and not in contradiction with a Dallara Stradale. To the contrary, the enable each other.
This diverse future is enabled by new technologies that lower the complexity of making new vehicles, but it is the focus on use over ownership and multi modal behaviour that is key. This 'shared behaviour' allows us to combine different modes of transport AND make each of this modes better at what they are doing. A sports that only needs to be a sports car will always give better performances, and a specific city vehicle will always be better at that than the car that needs to go on the highway too.
Today the SUV is the pinnacle of an era in which we developed cars that needed to be able to do everything, tomorrow we will demand of our vehicles to be better at doing a specific thing.

Vehicle forcefields


A vehicle in essence originates where contextual needs coincide with human desires, with technology being an enabler to transform that encounter into reality.  And 100 years of evolution towards the 'ideal vehicle' has resulted into the current archetype of the car with its unparalleled sophistication and capacities. 
But those contextual needs and human desires are in strong evolution and a diversified multi-use future now urges us to reframe our thinking. We need to redefine what context needs are relevant for a specific use, and what user desires are really at play then and there. And 're-search' what is the new vehicle or service that is the crystallisation of these new forcefields. Now the time is right to leave behind our archetypical thinking and explore what the new archetypes will be in that diversified future.

Mobility chain


It is generally known that human mobility is shifting from a commodity towards a service. Values such as cost, efficiency, sustainability and flexibility create an environment in which a single modal solution is hard to fit in.  This multi-modality builds on a number of vertical silos that, by now, have all achieved high quality levels. The connection between these silos is, however, where the mobility experience breaks and where challenges are. We need to shift towards a 'transversal thinking' , keeping now longer the object or vehicles as our focul point, but the human mobility experience that will weave 'through the mobility chain'.  We can then see that not only the quality of the vehicle and the service will play an essential role, but also that the 'connection experience' should become an integral part of our design thinking to reach a fluid and qualitative mobility experience. 
Central in this thinking in what we call 'low treshhold behaviour': we project the fluidity and ease of use of our digital lives onto our physical environment, setting new standards for vehicle and mobility interactions.

(Lowie Vermeersch)

Article published in
February 2016