18th February 2021 | Pandemic | Mobility
The 10-year pandemic crisis; the rise of micro-mobility
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#1: The 10-year pandemic crisis
I’ve just written an article for SOIF, where I mostly work, on the long pandemic crisis. The starting point was an observation in a report by the Collective Psychology Project, as was, that the health crisis would last a couple of years, the economic crisis five years or a decade, and the psychological crisis a generation.
I used a futures wheel to look at how the current factors would play out, and this leads to six themes, on business, finance, technology, home, health, and geopolitics.
(Source: SOIF)
Here’s a summary of the headline conclusions:
The people most likely to do worst in the post-pandemic labour market — women, BAME workers, and young people — are also groups which have been most politicised in recent years. Expect a strong political reaction.
The leading economies have been on life support provided by the central banks since the financial crisis. This is likely to continue for another decade. Last time around it fuelled inequality. This time it may have to be designed with better social outcomes in mind.
The regulatory pressure on big tech is unlikely to go away. Expect to see them embrace regulatory ‘solutions’ that they can manage but which disadvantage smaller competitors.
The psychological effects of the pandemic could last a generation. Such effects are partly a response to shared grief, but they are also broader. The effects of social isolation, family conflict, economic anxiety and the realisation that life is less certain may also live with children and young people for decades.
The pandemic has accelerated the transition to a multi-polar world, but in ways that may be profoundly destabilising. This in turn means that the response to the worsening humanitarian crises that follow the pandemic will be more uneven.
Since we wrote the report, the IMF has produced research that suggests that social instability starts to increase in periods after a pandemic.
This analysis shows that, over time, the risk of riots and anti-government demonstrations rises. Furthermore, the study finds evidence of heightened risk of a major government crisis—an event that threatens to bring down the government and that typically occurs in the two years following a severe epidemic.
Buckle up.
#2: The rise of micro-mobility
About 10 years ago I did a small futures project for a car company on the future of urban mobility. One of the interesting findings that emerged from the analysis of the drivers of change was a set of trends that we labelled “lightweight transport”—a group of vehicles that ranged from the smart car at the top of the range to bikes to push-scooters and even Segways and roller-blading at the other.
Since then the trend has accelerated, partly through the emergence of e-bikes and e-scooters. The pandemic prompted a further spike in what’s now known as “micro-mobility.” Design Observer has a long article looking at both trends and innovation in this space:
Micromobility signifies a potential total redesign of transportation as we know it, paving the way to create a more sustainable urban transport system, reducing “tons of CO2 emissions”. Human-powered and electric vehicles can support easier commutes, provide recreation, and provide the political will to support the “development of biking lanes'' and safer streets, and ultimately save riders time.
The cluster of trends that is shaping all of this includes the slow squeeze on car space in cities, the falling interest in vehicles (and licence-holding numbers) among Millennials, climate change concerns, an interest in more active modes of transport, and new materials and battery technologies, some crossing over from high end mobility technology. Design Observer, obviously, is interested in this last area, and part of the article draws on innovation case studies in the sector. At the shared e-scooter company, Bird, for example,
their “aerospace and automotive engineers are constantly innovating based on the experience and feedback from tens of millions of completed scooter rides globally.” Their design focus has included the development of leading battery technology, autonomous damage sensors, and puncture proof tires.
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