Walk_with_me
What if a parked car could light a stranger's path?
A person is walking through a dark parking structure at night.
One car's lights turn on softly as they approach. Then another. The lights are not triggered by ownership — there is no app, no key fob, no transaction. They respond to proximity. To a person moving through a shared space.
Walk With Me asks what a connected vehicle is when it is not being driven.
Collective intelligence of software-defined vehicles becomes a dynamic, collaborative community asset.
Connected experience is expanding:
from one2one to V2X /vehicle to everything/
X - isn’t only technological infrastructure, but also social practice that gives new services meaning.
Exploring how always-on capabilities of connected vehicle can act as a participant in a techno-social situation within a context of every-day social encounters
The software-defined vehicle is always on. Its sensors are awake. Its lights can be decoupled from their conventional functions. The question is whether that capability can be organized around something other than the owner's use — whether it can extend outward, toward the street, toward strangers, toward the social life of the city it sits in.
This is not a safety feature. It is a social proposition: that a vehicle fleet has collective intelligence it has not yet learned to use on behalf of the community around it.
A parked vehicle is not doing nothing. It is present. It is sensing. The behavioral scripts it currently runs — lock on departure, unlock on arrival — are written for a single user relationship.
Walk With Me proposes a another script, running in parallel, written for the shared space, and better reflecting emergent essence of adaptive, always on technology.
Both people and the lightening system of software-defined cars have agency for taking the first step, and this provides openings for serendipitous moments of shared experience, that moves beyond the expected.
As you are walking you start to realize that some of the parked vehicles turn on lights, spreading gentle glows… you start to realize that these glows are inspired by human proximity and movement.
Vehicles turn on de-coupled light units, for human proximity and movement. The walking paths illuminate in collaboration with humans & vehicles, creating living patterns, pulsing energy of the connected and collaborative city.
Human paths illuminated in collaboration with cars inviting moments of serendipitous experience and unexpected harmonies…
… creating pulsing energy of the connected world.
ML/AI algorithms can further expand the adaptive spectrum of experience and facilitate infinite openings for gentle, and barely perceptible moments and scenarios /see “Fireflies” mode below/
The outcome:
A joined US patent submission.
The underlying principle — a vehicle as adaptive, benevolent urban participant — shaped architecticting principles and multiple experience frameworks and for Ford's software-defined vehicle architecture.
Design question: Can a connected vehicle fleet act as a shared civic resource, not just a collection of individual assets?
Walk_with_me is a platform of experience propositions inviting social forms of participation in urban context.
“Walk with me” moves beyond the one-to-one relation, intentionally expanding connected car vocabulary, into welcoming every pedestrian gesture, of gently lightening their path, using thoughtfully modulated, and directionally engaged, de-coupled LED light units.
Modular, adaptive, service-driven SDV architecture:
context and a vehicle as a resource
Our experience demonstrates how Software Defined Vehicle is starting to participate in new, unfolding techno-social situations redefining the ownership experience as an adaptive entity, an open structure, engaging in a search for possibilities.
Walk with me articulates how Software Defined Vehicle Architecture represents a new model of collaboration between people and technology that unlocks the potential of technology to participate in human relations.
Designing new forms of social presence gives connected vehicle license to co-participate in everyday moments of social practice.
