Untangling self-driving vehicle training data

Co-designing a set of enterprise offerings around autonomous vehicle data for major automotive companies

• Client an international services company

• Roles workshop co-facilitator, presentation designer

• Duration one week

• Traits #IoT #service design #transportation #workshop

Note: Details of this case study removed for client privacy. Contact me for more on this and other projects.

A deluge of sensor data

Numerous automotive players are entering the autonomous space— some are century-old giants, other are hungry startups. They all face challenges with transporting, storing, securing, annotating, and legally handling the 4 terabytes of daily data collected from each vehicle. Our client, an established global services company, needed to develop an offering for some of its automotive customers.

An A-team of self-driving knowledge

We assembled internal experts in the automotive industry, data management, mapping services, and connected mobility for a three-day workshop to hone in on the most relevant client challenges and pair them with existing strengths of their organization.

The expressway to a focused offering

Our process:

• Broke the ice and helped the team of strangers get honest about hopes and fears for the project.

• Sought out related work and industry experts within the organization, and scheduled interviews with them.

• Combined that research with the team’s various expertise into a service blueprint for the data itself, using it to identify key gaps or pain points.

• Created empathy maps for key actors and decision-makers, then guided our participants through multiple iterations of business concept posters to identify value propositions and boil down the offering into three distinct services.

• Gathered feedback on the offering from a prospective customer.

Road bumps in the process

• The original goal lacked focus: Use previous UI work (too specific) with laser systems to create an offering (too vague) around autonomous vehicle data.

• Over the course of the workshop, we focused the goal to align with the organization’s strengths and applied them to large-scale data management, security/compliance, and combing the data to separate the value from the noise.

• Our time was extremely limited, but we kept a tight schedule and divided to conquer and finished on time.

Just the first leg of a long journey

From this blitz of a workshop came an offering pitch deck, a workshop recap deck to help them gain internal buy-in for building the offering, and additional knowledge for all involved about the emerging field of autonomous vehicles.

Cover photo by Jennifer Morrow under a CC license.