Signals

Sweden – The retailer’s innovation lab Space10 has designed a series of seven speculative car interiors for tomorrow’s autonomous vehicles.

The project, created in collaboration with design studio Foam, imagines a future where self-driving vehicles offer various functions beyond human transportation. The concepts include a retail interior featuring Ikea products, a convenience store car and even a moving hotel. Currently, Spaces on Wheels only exists in augmented reality, but can be ‘ordered’ to a customer’s house using an iPhone. Through the phone, users can then explore how their chosen concept car will look parked on their doorstop.

‘When spaces are able to move themselves, they would no longer just be means of transportation, but could be tailored to the very activities we spend most time on – while moving you from A to B,’ says Kaave Pour, co-founder of Space10.

As explored in our macrotrend Subconscious Commerce, brands such as Toyota and Pizza Hut are also exploring future retail concepts housed within autonomous vehicles.

London – In light of GDPR and the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Roca London Gallery has launched a new exhibition that focuses on how data can positively shape urban design.

Part of this year’s London Design Festival, The Data and Life of Great Future Cities exhibition explores how, when used responsibly, data can improve human’s experience of cities. Treepedia, for example, uses Google Street View to compare tree canopies in cities around the world, while the Friendly Cities project analyses phone usage in Singapore to understand how people ‘bond’ through deliberate connectivity with friends or ‘bridge’ via chance encounters with strangers. In turn, such data is being used to understand which places and spaces bring city-dwellers together.

Speaking at the exhibition, Fábio Duarte, a research scientist of the MIT Senseable City Lab, explained: ‘Our research shows that using aggregated, anonymised data opens up new possibilities of designing cities that are better adapted to human needs.’

To explore how data from devices and digital public feedback could influence our future cities, explore our Branded Cities report.

The Office for National Statistics has released a new study entitled Being 18 in 2018, which reviews the lifestyles of UK residents born in the year 2000. It found that the number of 18-year-olds currently unemployed or not looking for work outnumbered those who are working. Furthermore, the findings show that the number of 18 year’s old working – at 43% – is a significant decrease from the start of the millennium, when 60% of the age group were employed.

As Generation Z continue to find new ways to make money through methods such as fashion resale or sponsored social media content, working attitudes are shifting. For more on this topic, look out for our upcoming Youth macrotrend, launching in October.