How our independent research leads to meaningful innovation
By fostering a culture of continuous research, we created a team of innovators who are constantly pushing the boundaries of what is possible in mobility design.
Independent research as a tool to drive meaningful progress
At Granstudio, we have a culture of continuous independent research on a broad range of topics related to mobility, car design, and HMI. Being able to explore independently ensures a non-biased approach, and allows us to be truly free in creating future visions and even concrete projects we fully believe in.
While not being a goal in itself, innovation is often a necessity to realize meaningful progress. Therefore, we spur our team members to be innovative in their research and thinking, and to approach challenges with a critical and creative mindset. By encouraging an intrapreneurial spirit, we stimulate them to delve into unexplored territory and to take ownership of their findings and beliefs. By doing so, team members are empowered to take risks, experiment with new ideas, and challenge the status quo.
To help ourselves getting a firm grip on what lies ahead, we created our own smart database of emerging trends and technologies. The very extensive collection of information is utilized as building blocks of the future context in which we design our ideas.
One of the unique benefits of Granstudio is that our leading experts of all the specialized facets of mobility design are closely working together in a single space. Cross-fertilization between disciplines and various levels of seniority is a given, and together with our intrapreneurial mindset creates a positive space that leads to the most valuable ideas.
A selection of Research projects that became something more
KOMMA Urban Mobility Means
“In various urban projects our team was working on, we noticed specific challenges and use cases that did not have satisfactory answers in today's mobility offering. What started as an internal research to address those, ended up to be a proper startup.”
- Wouter Haspeslagh, Chief Urbanist & Mobility Research
Based on extensive research, we defined an ultra-narrow four-wheeled vehicle that maximizes agility without compromising space for two. This solution uses the most advanced but production proven technologies to create a vehicle with a small footprint, offering a new balance between people, mobility and our urban environment.
Based on our ideas, Granstudio partnered with Petter Neby from Punkt to create Komma, an urban mobility company that will develop, produce and commercialize urban mobility means.
RESET immersive UX/UI design approach
“RESET started as a desire of working with those elements that are the most intangible, but yet the most interesting for a designer: interactions, emotions, advanced materials, visibility, surprising modularities… All of them make life on board our vehicles a joyful journey.”
- Rocco Carrieri, Chief Designer
RESET is a perpetually ongoing Granstudio research project to explore the potential of a more experience driven design approach. It became our favorite playground to quickly test new concepts and ideas related to exterior, interior, CMF, and HMI design.
The perennial nature of this project makes it shift shape over time, yet it always remains true to its essence and promotes to design from within a human experience.
DigiPHY Mixed Reality Tool
“We're always looking for ways to stay ahead of the game, which is why we actively invest in our own design process. With digitalization and UX becoming increasingly important, existing tools proved to be insufficient. That’s why we created DigiPHY. And let me tell you, it's been a game-changing approach. It has even led us to build our own software development team and partner up with some of the best game universities globally.”
- Wouter Struijk, Senior Design Manager.
DigiPHY combines physical haptic elements with interactive digital layers to create a single immersive environment.
What started as an exploration to improve our own design processes grew into a multifaceted design tool that creates great benefits not only for ourselves, but also for all our clients.
GESTURE control prototypes
“For one of our latest internal research projects, we used mixed reality to create gesture control prototypes. It is part of our ongoing experiments in which we explore new ways of interacting with a vehicle.”
- Lukasz Czekanowski, Chief Interaction Design
The created prototypes gave us new insights in the potential of gesture control for drivers and passengers, but also in its risks and hard no-no’s.
The experiments included subtle threshold motions that truly tested our tracking systems and generated new algorithmic building blocks we can include and expand on in other projects.
Gesture control ought not to be developed as a replacement for today’s interaction standards, but rather as an additional mode of interaction that can seamlessly integrate with the growing range of activities we do while being in a vehicle.
