Audi Urban Tribal Network

Project Team: Jeff Maeshiro, Patrick Mulcahy, Shirley Chong
Advisors: Jason Kelly Johnson, Nataly Gattegno and Haakon Faste, California College of the Arts, with Markus Auerbach , Audi AG
Location: San Francisco, California, USA
Year: 2014

Audi AG‘s innovation research office in San Francisco teamed up with the California College of the Arts (CCA) for a two week intensive workshop; an interdisciplinary collaboration geared towards exploring the car as a key intersection in a broader network of interconnected devices. Spearheaded on the AIR side by Markus Auerbach and on the CCA side by Jason Kelly Johnson and Nataly Gattegno of Future Cities Lab from the architecture department and Haakon Faste from the Interactive Design department, the workshop ran from June 6th to the 20th, 2014, and brought together students from the industrial design, interior design, graduate design, design MBA, and undergraduate and graduate architecture departments.

We proposed Audi re-imagine themselves as a data network, with cars as one of the sensor laden components of their brand. In the future it will be essential for Audi to own a slice of the data ecosystem, and gathering data will provide value to layered sets of urban stakeholders: drivers, pedestrians, businesses, policy makers, neighborhood groups, etc. Audi would use this data service to help owners form “tribes”, networks formed around shared interests and ideals, all facilitated by Audi’s platform of connected devices, offering seamless interfacing between digital sensing and physical acting.