Unlocking vertical mobility may help us completely rethink how we move in cities
KONE launched their new elevator earlier today, with a view of the City of London’s newest towers. It may mark the start of convergence between conversations around how to make cars more relevant to today’s changing world and the future of lifts. Both have had an equally strong impact on the form of our cities; lifts taking us up, cars taking us wide. Without lifts our cities would likely all be around five to eight storeys high at most. China’s urbanisation, for example, would have looked very different. In Shanghai alone, more than 35,000 towers over eight storeys have been constructed since 1990, aided by more affordable lift technologies. Cities don’t necessarily need tall buildings to maximise land use, but the reality is that the prospect of kilometre high buildings means vertical mobility freedom is elevated (excuse the pun) to the wider discussion around urban mobility.
The question is how to seamlessly join horizontal and vertical together? Could a transport app like CityMapper include the amount of time it’ll take to get from the ground floor to the 39th storey? Doing this may well encourage building management teams to rethink how long it takes just to get through the lobby area. It’s seldom lifts that slow us down, but as the last part of long and complicated journeys they often bear the brunt of our stress when running late. A seamless, buttonless trip means we don’t have any buttons to press to soak up pent up tension. The context around us needs to intuitively provide a level of feedback so we can know we’ve been taken care of, our desire understood. Data, its intelligent interpretation and thoughtful design all play a big role in achieving an experience that feels fluid and free.
The KONE DX, which is offering more than just a lift with a platform and open API may provide a clue of how to improve the value of time we spend moving in cities. It is incredibly difficult to work through the thought experiment of how AI and connectedness may change cars. The fluidity of road space and myriad variables and people means it is necessary to figure out safety long before exploring weightier topics like sentience, data, people-first design and the ethics of AI. Lifts are, by design, much safer given their contained environments. Basic safety is largely solved. It is also possible to get much finer detail on the people flow of a building, offering micro-level clues to how people use space, and how culture impacts on this. So could this product provide the case study cities have needed to think through higher level considerations when it comes to the seamless merging of technology and the built environment? It may be that the technologies that bolt into the lift experience progress far quicker than others in helping us reimagine what the built environment of the future could look and feel like. What takes us up may well help us on the ground too.