Timmy Ghiurãu is an innovation leader at Volvo Cars and co-founder of The Point Labs, known as the New Immersive Bauhaus. With over a decade of experience at Volvo Cars, he spearheaded innovation initiatives in simulations, spatial computing, autonomous vehicles, XR and AI, showcasing his prowess as a creative technologist.

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These are live-blogged notes from a session at NEXT24 in Hamburg.

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How does a man who doesn’t like corporations or cars very much end up working for Volvo? What if his skills could do something far beyond a better AR configurator, and move into the realm of making the world better? How could we use emerging technologies not just to make cars better, and safer, but to reshape society in a positive way? That was interesting to him:

You need a box to think outside the box. And automotive is a really big box.

Integrating emerging technologies requires an iterative process; you need to iterate on your ideas. And you need to work with multiple teams. You don’t want to concentrate on one department, on one process, and then make that a bottleneck. To create value, you have to implement the tools across the value chain.

Bottom-up innovation

But he didn’t want to go the “innovation lab” route at first in Volvo. Sure, he could have got board’s blessing and some cash, but that leaves the implementation challenge ahead of you. If you start working bottom up, you embed the innovation from the start.

Car design is a multifaceted process — many teams contribute to the final experience that is the car. And that’s got ever more complex as cars gain more sensors. In fact, now they’re full of the sorts of sensors that we need for VR and AR experiences.

So, they succumbed to a lab: the Extended Reality Lab, to look at what they could do with the existing technology outside the car. They built a “Tinder for designers”, where users can swipe through car designs in VR, and which allows safety testing for things like moose crossing the road — a real problem in Sweden. But this also helped shorten the time they took to design and test cars.

Rethinking automotive companies

Volvo has a sharing culture. When they invented the three-point seatbelt, they shared it with everyone. But this is an interesting time to share. As a friend of his put it:

Automotive is having a midlife crisis with borderline disorder.

They’re mobility companies. Or tech companies. Or entertainment companies… The new narrative of automotive needs writing. And that’s where artists come in.

Artists are those who can articulate our collective sentiment better than anyone else. And that’s why he started working with an acquaintance who’d worked on movies and TV and who was skilled at working out “what ifs” and building the systems that explained the future world they were exploring. Minority Report is so compelling because it combines multiple lenses of the future into a single, coherent world.

That was the process he wanted to bring to bear on the future of Volvo.

We can’t just have human-centric design: we need to consider society and the planet. We need to make sure Volvo cars work all over the world. So, defining the futures you want requires world-building.

They collected 100s of stories from all over the world, looking into the past enough to predict the future they wanted. From these stories, they crafted future narratives for places all over the world — and then they could craft cars to suit those narratives.

Yes, they’re “what if” questions — but gathering those stories allows them to ask those questions with greater clarity, focus, and purpose.