Rata

Design With Data / System Design / UX Design

Solo Project / 2018 / 6 Months

Introduction

The project started from the question “How(or how else) people in the cities could benefit from mobility data?”

Biking enables people to travel efficiently and it bridges different other transportations, thus reflects mobility in a capillary level. In addition, biking provides more freedom comparing to driving and public transportation which are more subjected to the traffic and schedule. As a result, it is a good starting point to look into biking context to gain insight of mobility-related behaviours.

In recent years dockless bike share has become a highly mobile and widely used platform in China. It provides an opportunity to study both common and individual biking experience. Yet so far data from bike share(time, location, track, etc.) has been used only for managing bike resources.

But what if users share not only bikes, but also biking experience? What if, besides pure records of time and location, more types of data could be collected from bike share and could be interpreted in a more human-experience-based way?

Rata is a bikeshare-based system being able to perceive biking experience in urban environment and provide users with customised route recommendation, real time notification and event-based personal biking logs.

How might data on bikes describe experience?

Data collected from the bikes may reveal the incidents and behaviours. As per the relationship of incidents/behaviours and conditions such as time and user habits, different aspects of experience can be recognized.

Rata define riding experience by three categories: safety&efficiency, comfort and joy.

People react to road condition and environment in the same way in some cases and differently in others. If there is a uphill in the road followed by a downhill, most bikes will show a speed change of normal-slow-fast-normal. While if there is a landmark sculpture on the road side, probably only those who are new to the city will stop by, take some photos and go on riding.

In the future, when technology, legal system and public awareness of privacy develop to a certain extent, the value of personal behavioural data will be better defined and utilized. It can be hypothesized that users might be willing to trade their behaviours in a anonymous way for better and customized services based on the mass behaviors.

What does Rata System consist of?

RataOn-Bike is a device attached on each bike with the sensors(GPS, acceleration sensor, light sensor, etc.), communication modules and a small screen. The device collects various data as the user rides, preprocesses the data and uploads events.

RataApp provides users with visualised experience information on the route. For instance, a tourist will know immediately after inputting the destination that he/she is going on a bike trip with “complex traffic but a couple of attractions along the way”.

RataCloud receives mass events with geo-tag and timestamp uploaded from the RataOn-Bikes, conducts further analysis and clustering, and generates complete biking experience map of the city.

How does Rata work?

The map of Rata System

For detailed information please email lu.ye@network.rca.ac.uk to get the full text of  the paper

Prototype

Development and Testing of RataOn-Bike

Hi-Fi RataApp