DK&A

DK&A is a European product design and development studio, enabling innovation where it matters.

“LiDAR — how autonomous vehicles see the world”. DK&A enables automotive suppliers to push the boundaries of mobility.

Anaxeos — A multi-modal travel application for the future of transport. — For Virgin Hyperloop One, 2018.

—Shaping
deep emotional connections

Creating anything meaningful requires the ability to understand the needs and views of all our users, customers and fellow humans on both on a rational and emotional level. This is how we’re biologically wired. We must suspend our disbeliefs and openly engage new ideas to fulfill the needs of others. This is called empathy. The very best companies, products, and services are built on a foundation of empathy. It’s our most important skill.

True innovation happens in context

We now have a chance to do more with less and, above all, a chance to listen to and serve customers better than ever before. In 2017 the primary decisive factor of success is no longer budget, headcount or experience — it’s the drive and ability to continuously innovate.

Digital transformation has changed the way we think of the products and services we interact with every day. Very similar to natural ecosystems, digitalisation has enabled the creation of self-organising, scalable business realms which now permeate every facet of our lives. In less than ten years, we’ve seen the crumbling of entire decades-old industries. Virtually any business, product or vertical can be wiped out overnight by something more user-friendly, convenient or cheaper.

UX design for the most advanced UAV in the world.
© Sharper Shape Inc. 2017

Mobility

Envisioning Hyperloop

Imagine yourself hitting the slots in Las Vegas, then going to a Lakers game in LA, and coming back to Vegas in time for dinner. All that in one night. Only in your dreams, right? Achieving all that, and even faster and cheaper than flying, sounds like science fiction. But with Hyperloop that will become reality, one day in the future. That’s why Virgin Hyperloop One asked us to show consumers today how real that future could be.

Virgin Hyperloop One promises to provide the most fast and economical long distance travel, with a target speed of 1,200 km/h (745 mph) in a vacuum tube. For CES 2018, Virgin Hyperloop One also wanted an application that could provide an end-to-end passenger experience, including multimodal transportation options from door-to-door. To demonstrate all this, we designed a concept app for use by future hyperloop passengers on smartphones. Passengers can book a seat in the hyperloop, schedule an Uber or Lyft from or to the hyperloop station, get walking directions, and even splurge on an entertainment pod to watch their favorite TV-series along the way. The app reveals how hyperloop travel can soon meet our transportation needs.

The gap of long haul travel experience will be bridged by the multimodal transportation app. Soon you’ll be traveling by the speed of sound, if not supersonic. With a smooth end-to-end travel experience. It’s a paradigm change.

Keywords: mobile development, digital design, service concept, user experience, multimodal travel

Hyperloop Mobile App — The Hyperloop mobile app © Virgin Hyperloop One 2018

Mobility

Connecting vehicles

With shared mobility, autonomous driving, electric motorization, and connectivity on the rise, nobody knows what the automotive industry will look like in a decade’s time. The practicalities of regulations, consumer understanding, and safety concerns mean change is likely to be more evolutionary than revolutionary.

We assist traditional automotive companies with the rapid innovation happening outside of the car, in the service space, where connectivity, navigation and data enable better driving experiences and more contextually relevant services. The short-term question for many of the most iconic automakers is whether they can engage their customers more deeply with their brand. We lay the groundwork for tomorrow with answers we can deploy today, like more efficient and innovative use of basic digital channels that we all know and use: mobile apps and web services.

Keywords: connected vehicle services, data-informed design, machine learning, autonomous driving, geospational cloud platforms

Health

Sitting is killing us

A flood of fitness and health wearables has hit the market in the past few years and it has become increasingly hard to imagine a space for truly new and impactful solutions. In our work for a currently undisclosed national research organisation in this context, we have discovered however that most applications solely aim to increase activity by various means. Utilizing a new type of sensor for a pilot test case at a large airline we took a different approach and aimed at eliminating passiveness.

Being able to clearly correlate nation-wide research data about illnesses such as Type II Diabetes or cardiovascular disease to passiveness, we're working on something that might just earn its space the ecosystem.

Keywords: business concept, design, development, service concept