shiftcontrol: Automobility
For instance, viewers can see that six of the world’s top ten companies are related to the oil or auto industries. They learn that more crashes occur on small local roads than on freeways with high speed limits. One display spotlights the 1.75 cars manufactured each second worldwide.
Another explores the relative efficiency of alternative fuels, showing the amount of geographic area required to produce biofuels vs. wind energy. Here the project team boldly included data that exposes the downside to green-sounding corporate positioning. “The presentation is factual and encyclopedic,” explains Schaefer, “so we were OK to show both sides.” In this case, Mobiglobe data indicate that to run all German cars for a year on Volkswagen’s biofuel of choice would require turning more than one third of German land into agriculture dedicated to mobility. And that, notes Schaefer dryly, “is not a viable option.”
© Hosoya Schaefer Architects / shiftcontrol
Thanks to shiftcontrol’s inventive presentations, none of this information is static. “You can see how fast the cars are produced,” comments Skogmo. “Our team built a body of knowledge that the viewer can explore visually, then adjust the parameters to see what impact that has.”
Architecturally Speaking
As the lead researcher on Mobiglobe, Schaefer appreciates the larger role of the exhibition. “Since its invention,” he says, “the car has always been about more than just movement. The automobile and automobility have brought about a whole range of phenomena that, to a large extent, define our society.”
Schaefer notes that in many parts of the world, a carless life is hard to imagine. “What’s even worse,” he notes, “is the places — like large suburban developments in the industrialized nations — where life without a car is not even possible.”
This model, Schaefer believes, cannot continue. “While cars are getting more secure, comfortable and attractive for individuals, on a global level automobility reaches its limits. Resources and spaces are becoming scarce. Global risks, like climate change, are becoming apparent. In order for individual mobility to retain the role it has today, automobility needs to be fundamentally reinvented.”
That will happen, he thinks, as we develop new efficiencies, energy sources, transport modes, behaviors and values — a need that’s especially urgent in light of the huge potential demands from emergent economic powers like China and India. Comments Schaefer, “Mobiglobe shows in encyclopedic breadth the topics that define contemporary mobility.”
Mac-Based Workflow
“Our workflow is always on Macs,” says Skogmo, “and that was certainly true for this project since it was also designed to run on Macs.” That, he adds, “was such a relief to us, because the Mobiglobe installation is in a highly managed context. In that sense,” he notes, laughing, “it’s really German. But when Autostadt required that the installation run on Macs, we knew the project would be fun.”
Continues Skogmo, “The Mac has all these great operating system-level features, like launchd, which restarts a process if it goes down.” With two Macs at each viewing station, shiftcontrol created a shell script that automatically relays all actions on one system — including viewer touchscreen input — to the other. “To try to do that in Windows would be insane,” scoffs the designer. Too, he says, “UNIX is so powerful. For the developer, it provides system stability and maintenance and process monitoring — on the Mac, all that is perfect.”
Complementary Skills
Each partner contributed his expertise. Schaefer’s architecture team did the research, decided which elements would be included, and created the visuals — starting from paper sketches, then proceeding to Illustrator, Photoshop and Maya. The graphic design firm defined Mobiglobe’s visual language, including font and color scheme. Shiftcontrol collaborated closely in the conceptual phase, then employed Maya, Unity and proprietary code to add the elements of space, time and user interactivity.
“Unity is a game engine that runs on Mac and Windows, with an authoring tool that's Mac-only,” explained Skogmo, “and we’re one of only a handful of companies using it in this unforeseen context of non-game development work. We chose a game engine because they have great capabilities in 3D real-time graphics, and we chose Unity because it’s fast, easy to use, stable — and it’s built on a Mac. It was a natural choice to visualize 3D data in real time.”
Projects like Mobiglobe allow Skogmo, Svensson, Schaefer and their teammates to surpass what each firm could achieve individually — and invite audiences to see the world in new ways. They credit Apple for helping put their ideas into motion. “The elegance of Apple’s high-performance computing platform,” says Skogmo, “inspires us to redefine what software can and cannot do.”
