HERE came to Topp to help answer a question: how will mapping data and services impact people and shape cities…ten years in the future?
As a leading player in location-based data services, HERE has seen firsthand how data can transform everyday life. And they see even bigger changes coming: smart cities, driverless vehicles, drone delivery, augmented reality, just to name a few.
So they enlisted Topp to help form a long-term strategic vision, with an eye toward 2025, a time when street maps are antiques, replaced by richly layered indexes of physical and human reality.
Drawing on current trends in technology, commerce and culture, we developed a series of alternative visions, each painting a picture of how location-based data can make the coming changes more effective, useful, and humane:
Together, these visions give HERE a solid foundation for developing future services, so that when the technology is ready, they will be too.
“The future’s already here, it’s just not very evenly distributed,” a sci-fi author once said. Envisioning tomorrow often means spotting the futures that are already here, then asking what they look like at scale, and intelligently connected.
Location data is more than just maps. It’s a lot of really emotional things too: how we (and our things) get around, how we live and work, whether we feel safe or connected. The project had to address all of that.
HERE doesn’t just collect information—they provide tools. So besides being interesting and accurate, each of the alternatives had to hint at new services they could offer, and how to provide them.
