StarRide Express
(4-person-group project in Mastering Service Design course by Service Design College, 2022)
StarRide Express is an innovative business proposal for Polestar to envision a sustainable future for mobility. Besides their existing collaborations to achieve an ambition of producing climate-neutral production electric vehicles, Polestar positions itself as a digital products provider to facilitate changes to the mobility ecosystem.
Sustainable service ecosystem | Systems thinking and Futures thinking | Service business strategy | Experience design
We defined our project to target long-distance travellers who need to drive in their cars for the travel, such as in-land travellers with lots of luggage and travelling in groups (might include pets) and/or travelling to places without good public transport.
Developed from how could Polestar nudge people to make changes in their travelling behaviours and contributes to a sustainable future, specifically in one mode of mobility - long-distance travel - and we believe more people would switch towards an environmentally conscious choice.
This is a project by a group of four from a two-month all-around service design course - Mastering Service Design course from Service Design College.
StarRide Express is a train/hotel/changing station with two options for tickets.
By encouraging people to travel with trains and EVs to reduce their carbon footprint from long-distance travel, StarRide Express is a cross-countries train service with an EV charging feature and other additional travelling amenities like bedrooms and food and beverage services.
This mobility service tackles one of the most common comments to EVs – the short range – and provides a comfortable pit stop for long-distance travellers.
Economy Class: No access to their cars during the travel.
First Class: Cars are in the same compartment as their bedroom.
We see Polestar as the initiator of collaborations of building/ facilitating the infrastructure and the amenities on the train together with other partners.
Leveraging the detachable characteristic of train cars, and also taking this as the essence of this mobility service, we proposed this is a long-term experiential project that would constantly transform and re-arrange to enable each ride to be a more and more satisfactory service experience.
Design Process
Being able to travel from one location to another efficiently, comfortably and safely while reducing impacts on the environment are the core expectations for travelling.
We conducted in-depth interviews with eight individuals who either have experience driving EVs or are potential EV owners on their current mobility context in three aspects: Modes, Needs, and Reasons.
To understand service in mobility, we also analysed some anthropology and social study researches about mobility during the COVID lockdown situation. And took the changes in patterns of mobility from a global condition as a reference to develop our hypothesis.
If we break 'mobility' down and look into its system, then the concept of "The road is the product, modes of travel are the services." will become clear. This understanding helped us to set a starting point to indentify interactions that related to mobility.
We looked into news and global databases and created a variation of the STEEP analysis to identify the patterns and indicators behind EV popularisation.
Explored the trend of EV popularisation further, we forecasted an alternative future - what if... gas cars are banned? - to grasp the possible impacts and discover opportunities for business innovation within the mobility ecosystem.
Continued with the explorations of future forecasts on the global megatrends in EV popularisation and sustainable developments for this service innovation.
We aimed to look from a wider scope of perspectives into the possible technological and economical factors of sustainable mobility.
In the end, we anchored our hypothesis into two inevitable issues – 1) The range anxiety when driving in EVs and 2) The global transition to have more EVs on the road.
Although we didn't have the time to explore prototyping or co-creation, for us, we see StarRide Express as a project to employ Service Design tools to thoroughly venture into user-centred service creation and new opportunities for a sustainable service.