The Ford Smart Mobility Challenge seeks to harness the “brilliant ideas” of the gaming community to help drive positive change in the behaviour of commuters.

Bloomberg Business

Video game developers should create online games to help solve real-world problems with urban transportation, car maker Ford says.
The Ford Smart Mobility Challenge, unveiled on Thursday at trade fair Gamescom, seeks to harness the “brilliant ideas” of the gaming community to help drive positive change in the behaviour of commuters — while allowing transport providers to plan their services more efficiently.
“Games are mainly about rules and mechanics. These are the ingredients that help us to organise the digital world,” said Bjoern Bartholdy, professor for media design and co-director, Cologne Game Lab, which worked with Ford to create the competition.
“So making games helps us to understand complex systems — and mobility has become a very complex system,” he said.
“The idea is to apply patterns that we know from digital games to help travellers have a safer, more enjoyable, better way to navigate through this complex system,” Bartholdy added.
Entries to the competition could include games that reward commuters for walking or cycling in good weather and connect them to car-sharing services or under-utilised routes.
“Most people are stuck in mobility patterns around the routes and modes of transport they use around cities. We think they’re doing that as a coping mechanism,” explained Will Farrelly, who works on user experience innovation for Ford Smart Mobility.
Ford’s research showed that people aren’t just looking to arrive on time at a good time, but also place value on the quality of the journey. “There is great value in arriving somewhere in a good state of mind, with low anxiety,” Farrelly added.
“Messages around how overcrowded or comfortable a journey was, along with other social information might be more relevant for helping end users make informed decisions,” he said, adding that travellers might not care that there journey was 10 minutes longer if it was a less stressful one.
There’s a prize of €10,000 ($10,900) for the winning team plus the possibility of further investment from Ford if the idea is good enough.
“If we can find a really important piece of user interface design that can change consumer behaviour or reduce travel anxiety, I have high confidence we’d invest in that,” Farrelly said.
Major trends including urbanisation and mobile technology are changing people’s behaviour and expectations of services and we need to be able to compete in that changing world, he said, mentioning startups including Uber, BlaBlaCar and CityMapper.
“These are asset-light and in terms of business potential very highly valued,” he added.
The auto industry is facing a critical moment, Farrelly said, as technology plays havoc with 100 years of car design and urban transport certainties.
“If we don’t understand how the car and mobility services can work together, then we’re going to have an issue down the road.”