Gadi Amit: How Scrappy Experimentation Yields Real Results
Gadi Amit likes to explore personal projects to see how they can lead to huge new client opportunities. Images courtesy of NewDealDesign
The NewDealDesign studio in San Francisco is built for collaboration–literally. Half the office space is set up for team members to build delivery robots for Postmates, design the Fitbit tracker, and explore the future of living with modular living spaces to address the housing shortage. (The studio just off the Embarcadero is big enough to house cabin-sized prototypes.)
Lately, they’ve been working away on the Rolla, a company-wide study that looks and acts like an autonomous, mini cable car, designed to transport a few people around town at a time. It’s both a legitimate exercise to rethink how we can move throughout cities and a way to encourage outside-the-box thinking on a project that is not hemmed in by client constraints.
“It’s a project of learnings that prepares us for the possibility of huge client projects,” says Gadi Amit, founder of NewDealDesign. Amit, who was born in Israel to parents who were architects, has always loved cars and went to design school to design them. Then he discovered the Macintosh computer and ultimately made his way to the Bay Area to bridge the digital and physical in new and innovative ways. Here, he shares the idea behind the Rolla, how it can move people smoothly around crowded cities, and why it’s so important for his team to tackle personal projects.
The Rolla design is based off of the cable car and the tuk tuk.
Micromobility is a hot topic. What is your view on it?
We felt that a lot of the discussion today on micromobility is relatively simplistic, a combination of an app and usually with a scooter or bicycles. In reality, it doesn't fit a lot of cities or people. How do you use these if you pick up your child at daycare, then pass through the grocery store on your way home? Or if you are a disabled person or older person? Or if you want to get a little drunk with your buddies?
We’ve been working on autonomous vehicles for the last five years and understand the footprint issues on the American urban landscape. It’s true that bicycles and scooters offer a new dimension to mobility, but, because bicycles are so fragile they actually command bigger space than their actual physical footprint–two square meters because drivers route around them. So we landed on a unique footprint, which is very similar to a pallet for cargo and is only about one meter by one-meter-and-a-half long. Surprisingly, you could put up to five or six people on it.
How exactly did you land on the idea of the pallet?
We want to create a relatively dense solution, so we could put a lot of them into a service area like a plaza or pedestrian streets. They need to be very maneuverable. And they need to be able to carry more than two people. Because we’ve worked with Postmates on their delivery robots, we understood how to make such vehicle work quite well, how much horsepower you need, and the size of the wheels. We’ve worked with other clients on sensors, so we also understand those essential technologies.
What did you learn from being in the city of San Francisco that informed how you designed these?
First, it's a hilly city and you learn the limits of scooters and bicycles. The second thing is the city has been stuck on some underground project for the last 10 years–I actually think that the political and economical dynamics in the western world today are not conducive for these mega projects. We don't have enough political capital to invest $20 billion for 10 years to 15 years.
The last thing I have to say positively for San Francisco is the presence of cable cars. The cable cars and the ability to ride comfortably on an open platform, hopping on and off, proved the concept of the semi-open vehicle. All that amalgamated together into an electrical drive, autonomy sensor, and open architecture. The ability to have a centralized command allows you to invite the service to you or hop on a fixed service. Rolla has a dual mode: It travels around on fixed routes, but every once in a while a Rolla will be taken outside this route for a personal trip. We applied digital network thinking on one end of the project and a very original intent of Rolla’s physicality on the other.
The Rolla highlights the out-of-the-box thinking that defines the NewDealDesign culture.
You mentioned the cable car. Did you look to any other current modes of transportation for inspiration?
We looked at the rickshaw, and we realized that the footprint of cities is not going to change and the density of people is just going to grow. That metamorphosed with the cable car and the electric drive and all that culminated into that pallet form factor.
How did your test subjects respond to getting on a Rolla?
For one test, we had this wooden prototype that wouldn't actually move, but the interaction between people was something that we could test. If you're riding with a stranger, there's a certain distance of probably five or six feet that you feel comfortable with. For two people, that would be sufficient to go on a Rolla.
How did your team collaborate on it? And what principles does your team use to guide them?
We have few principles. The first principle we call “product as a system, system as a product”. It's the notion that everything we do for physical and digital products has to be right both as a system yet delight as a product. The system view is about the efficacy of the solution as a system,against various goals–environmental, societal, manufacturing, things like that.
There are many thoughts in design today about more of a system or analytical approach to problem solving. However, many of these projects are missing the emotional, nearly visceral connection to the human. That’s the ‘product’ part of the statement. When we make a system solution, you still need to feel the human presence in the design.
The second principle is we do things that combine digital and physical. Today, people are fully assimilated into the digital domain. We understand that this is an enriching domain that adds a layer people want, especially the younger generation of consumers.
The third component is craft, in the old sense. It’s a bit like Let's take a few pieces of plywood and test that cargo pallet. We actually had people sit and stand on the pallet and ask: How do you feel? Is that a good distance or not? Scrappy experimentation really yields results.
Design is a marathon, not a sprint.
It's true. You need it to simmer a bit longer to get a good one.
A few years ago when scooters started popping up everywhere, they felt like they overtook cities as riders just left them on the sidewalks and streets. How have you worked, or how do you think about working with, local agencies on how Rollas fit into their communities?
We are very aware, and listen to, the rejection voices in the communities around scooters and bikes. We have a unique perspective in that we designed Postmates’s robotic service, and we started that project against the backdrop of the city prohibiting delivery robots because some start-ups took control over bicycle lanes and pedestrian sidewalks. We know the importance of respecting the community footprint and how we should interact with the surroundings.
Another element we look at is that our user is not only an 18-to-28 year-old, which in many cases is the focal point of micromobility. Some of them are over 70. Some of them have children. We need to make sure that everyone feels comfortable to move around the city. Human sensibility is a big part of our DNA at NewDeal.
Why encourage your team to work on company-wide personal projects?
It’s about cultivating a creative culture. You can’t just turn on a switch and suddenly everybody is right and brilliant. You need to create momentum towards out-of-the-box thinking.
If you’d like to read more from The Creative Factor—such as Morten Bonde’s story about reinventing himself as a LEGO Art Director while losing his sight or Edése Doret: Inside the Mind-Boggling World of Private Jet Design—sign up for our newsletter.
