Picture of Raphael Reimann
Raphael Reimann

move lab Lead

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Looking back on 2016 we at moovel lab had quite some moments to flourish. Heading into 2016 worked brilliantly with Roads to Rome and greenskin under our belts. Since then, there’s been a lot to talk about ...

Cover for Bye 2016-Hello 2017

Making Great Things with Great People

Eileen leaving us in the end of 2016 was one of the biggest good-byes we’ve had to say. After founding and heading the lab (and moovel Products!) for two years she was our biggest supporter. moovel lab wouldn’t be here if not for Eileen. A big thanks to Eileen for being awesome!

But along with big Good-Byes there were also warm Hellos! We’re really happy to start off 2017 with Daniel as Head of Lab. Daniel is the founder and CEO of 47 Nord Media and Head of moovel Design. It feels natural to work with Daniel since he and his team have been a great help to the lab over the last few years. Now it's time to start implementing the new ideas we’ve worked out together over the last weeks of 2016.

The first moovel lab residencies started at the end of 2016!

Another great addition to our Team is Joey! He joined moovel lab at the end of 2016. Joey has a M.Sc from the University of British Columbia and was previously based at UCLA, MIT Senseable City Lab, and the Mozilla Science Lab. He’s here so we can create even more cool stuff this year. :)

We’ve also introduced our new residency program with Stephan Bogner and Michael Szell being the first ones to join us. Michael has worked at MIT Senseable City Lab and Northwestern University as a postdoc in complexity research. Stephan, formerly an intern in the lab, came back for seconds second shift after finishing his Bachelor’s in Interaction Design. They brought in new skills and ideas and worked on amazing stuff to be released soon - stay tuned.

Next to great our collaborator network, we’re also extremely happy about all the inspiring talents who came to work with us this past year. We are more than glad that Bjørn, Flore and Chris supported us throughout 2016.

New in 2017

With Daniel and Joey on board we have changed our course a little bit. The lab projects have all approached the future of mobility in a popular and somewhat scientific way. This shaped the term “Future Mobility Pop Science”, which we sometimes use to describe our work. Going forward we’d like to diversify our focus areas into the following three approaches:

  • Future Mobility Pop (the stuff you know and love us for)
  • Innovation Culture (foster and facilitate innovation tool sets and mindsets)
  • Product Prototyping (Create things more closely connected to our mobility app moovel)

Hard Work and Dedication are Noticed

We couldn’t be happier to mention that Roads to Rome has not only been accepted widely within the data & design community of the internet but has also been awarded some nice prizes. The German Design Council nominated us for the German Design Award 2017 - one of the most renowned design prizes in Germany. Also Kantar found Roads to Rome worthy of their Silver Information is Beautiful Award - which is one of the most recognised commercial prizes in the field of data viz. Not to forget the honorable mention by FastCompany’s “Innovation by Design”.

Project Overview

Some of the things we did 2016

Projects of 2016

While the buzz and excitement of Roads to Rome kept us quite busy, we also managed to continue our work with #teamchatviz - our slack integration to visualize your team’s communication behavior - opened up a new perspective on how we collaborate at moovel. Find an insightful blog-post to this by Eileen and Thorsten here.

Our recent video piece “moovel in a box” was our speculative design approach to urban mobility. Here we sought to redefining mobility through a logistic & transportation mash-up called “moovel in a box”. This was only possible with another great collaboration with David Leonard and his team at BuzzFeed. We shared the video on facebook and it made it to almost 800k views, along with quite a viral discussion.

Continuing in the data visualisation realm we debuted TRAJECTORIES this summer. The 3D wax printer allows us to draw mobility patterns of trip searches done in moovel resulting in a mobility landscape on paper. Probably the biggest surprise of 2016 was seeing footage of TRAJECTORIES in THE German national news broadcast “Tagesschau” (at 9:08 min). If you don’t know it, it’s probably because you’re not from Germany :))

My personal favorite of 2016 is the children’s book “Where Do Cars At Night”. Gathering these fantastic statements from kids on self-driving vehicles ended up in a beautiful video to accompany the book we’ve created.

Workshops of 2016

Next to great projects we’ve also had some inspiring workshops with our collaborating universities. Ranging from art to business and design to urban studies, we’ve covered a multitude of disciplines. See the recaps here: