Smarter Hobart Challenge: Bus Shelter and Digital Interface Design
City of Hobart City Innovation Division
The Smarter Hobart Challenge – Bus Shelter and Integrated Digital Interface Design competition has delivered an innovative and visionary approach to using bespoke public infrastructure development to enhance user experience and drive an increase in public transport usage.
The design challenge sought to harness the creativity and innovation of the community to drive an increase in public transport uptake, through a playful, and personalised location-aware experience, which would integrate real-time timetabling, appropriate weather protection and equitable access.
The successful solution by Supermanoeuvre has reimagined an intelligent bus shelter experience that could hail a bus, inform passengers about bus arrivals, and provide location-specific cultural and augmented content for immersive travel and tourism experiences.
The functional experience developed by Supermanoeuvre was completed by the delivery of an end-to-end, computational design and fabrication process using parametric design and automated manufacture, enabling shelters to be configured to each site and constructed from locally sourced sustainable materials.
Through the integration of an augmented reality process, a shelter can be viewed and configured on-site (through VR goggles) before being approved for manufacture, thereby providing “bespoke modularity” while dramatically reducing design time.
This approach is sustainable, iconic, modular, community-inclusive and technologically innovative.