UX
Mobility, it's the word we’ve come to rely on in the transportation world - overused, under-questioned, and increasingly inadequate. As a Product designer with experience spanning both the world of cars, products, and service design, I believe we’ve outgrown the term. It fails to capture the emotion, purpose, and emerging potential of how we humans wish to move. In fact, mobility, once a term of technological optimism, has become highly reductive, overly technical, and feels far removed from the emotional, sensorial, and even spiritual act of travel.
We’re overdue for a new design paradigm, one that recognises that moving is not just about efficiency or autonomy. Must we question – Is it about what the journey does to us? Because the future of movement isn’t just about getting somewhere, it’s about how it feels to get there. It’s about what we learn, experience, sense, and become along the way.
It is time that designers start to exit the tired confines of "mobility" and propose a future rooted in the aspects of emotive engineering, contextual intelligence, and human-centered travel & adventure.
We are not just moving from Point A to Point B anymore. We’re seeking thrill, joy, emotional resonance, aesthetic pleasure, purpose, and sometimes, transcendence. So, what if we reframe the conversation entirely from the lens of UX and the Service Design Lens?
What if we designed not for mobility, but for Experiential Travel - a term that hints at a designed, curated experience of movement, shaped by context, terrain, story, identity, and technology at its core?
Mobility in its current form has largely been a numbers game - fuel efficiency, top speeds, battery range, and congestion stats. But these metrics ignore the very reason we fell in love with machines in the first place. The motorbike ride up a misty hill. The hum of the engine through the night highway. The stillness of a bicycle as it coasts through a forest trail.
To find answers, we might look to unexpected sources: the intimacy of sailing, the sensory rhythm of horseback riding, the ritual of pilgrimages, the environmental attunement of Indigenous travel practices, the curiosity-driven movement of children.
These aren’t just transportation moments, they’re memory-forming, identity-shaping, life-defining journeys.
The future demands a deeper integration of emotional design, storytelling, and immersive tech into how we think about travel - especially when AI, HMI (Human-Machine Interfaces), virtual and augmented realities, and nature-responsive design are now already part of the equation.
As someone who began his journey designing concept cars, consumer products then crafting Product Strategies - arguably one of the most poetic and human-scaled travel devices. Working for the bicycle industry taught me something no advanced software ever could: the poetry of motion is found in simplicity, balance, and user engagement. A bicycle is not just efficient - it invites intimacy. You feel every curve, incline, and acceleration. This raw, embodied interaction is increasingly absent in the high-tech, screen-heavy, autonomous automotive future we’re building currently.
So how do we start to bring that kind of intimacy into our Phy-gital products & services?
This visceral, tactile, intuitive interaction is what future automotive experiences must recapture. The Product & UI UX designers must aim to choreograph experiences - hybrid moments where landscapes, senses, data, personality, and purpose align. They should ask:
What if a vehicle responds to your mood and tailors the environment in real-time?
What if your ride is embedded with rituals—light sequences, olfactory cues, or AI-guided reflections?
What if your transport adapts to terrains not just physically, but emotionally too?
What if Service design blueprints expand from “touchpoints” to pre-touchpoints - designing for the moment before the journey begins.
The result? A richer relationship with travel.
We are entering an era where the digital and physical must co-exist fluidly. It’s no longer enough to have screens and sensors. Integration is key to this evolution!
The terrain itself could be part of the interface. Imagine roads that communicate with your vehicle. Imagine AI co-drivers that act as mood balancers, conversation partners, or silence-keepers.
We are entering a Post-Interface Age - a moment where digital layers dissolve into the environment, service systems anticipate needs before they’re expressed, and movement becomes a co-authored performance between human and machine. In this world, transportation is not a service - it is evolving into a living ecosystem.
Let us look at the future from an Interaction Design perspective where digital UX UI interfaces fused with bio-adaptive entities could easily shift from being static constructs to -
Responsive UI X bio-materials: Interactive interface surfaces that absorb ambient toxins, filter air, and self-heal micro-damage.
Tactile UI intelligence: Surface interfaces that “learn” a user’s preferred grip, seating micro-movements, and even haptic vocabulary.
Experience Genome UI Mockups: Visualising a “sensory preference dashboard & apps.
Neuro-Responsive AR Navigation: Emphasis on routes shifting dynamically based on biometric data.
The future vehicle interfaces will become a co-evolving organism—learning from and adapting to its human counterpart over years, much like a trusted pet or a co-pilot friendly companion.
And most importantly: What values are we encoding into our future modes of travel?
The answers may not always lie in automotive history or even aerospace tech. We might find some of them in provocations around:
Indigenous ways of relating to land and movement.
The ritualistic nature of pilgrimages.
Children’s curiosity-driven movement patterns.
The sensuality of sailing or horseback riding and sports.
Science fiction, art, speculative design, and bio-engineering.
The most radical ideas may emerge when designers stop looking at dashboards and begin studying desire. Each of these ideas must have a reason, a story, a purpose. And each must aim to invite the user into a relationship - not just a ride.
To enable this, designers must step into new archetypes of Emotional Ergonomics. No longer just interaction-makers, they become experienced choreographers, dramaturgs, ecologists, and technologists. They must study not only user behaviours, but user rituals - how people feel at take-off, during pause, and on arrival. Designers need to collaborate with neuroscientists and sensory designers to understand how space and sound influence emotion and furthermore, to understand the emotional weight of space and form, and work with landscape architects to harmonize vehicles with the environments they travel through. Storytelling becomes essential - because the journey is no longer linear, it’s narrative.
Ultimately, what kind of humans are we inviting passengers to become? Are we building systems that foster reflection, empathy, and connection? It is memory, metamorphosis, and meaning in motion. We need something deeper. Something that moves not just bodies, but souls.
