An archive for a research group · plus the data-viz that became Uber Pool.
"Two pieces of work for the multidisciplinary lab at MIT — a non-traditional archive for ten years of research, and HubCab: an interactive visualisation of 170 million NYC taxi trips that inspired Uber's ride-pooling service."
Started in 2005, the Senseable City Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a multidisciplinary research group that studies the interface between cities, people, and technologies. It investigates how the ubiquity of digital devices and the various telecommunication networks that augment our cities are impacting urban living.
We built their famous archive of projects in a non-traditional way of structuring data and lab information. The result is a surprising navigation pattern that reflects the groundbreaking work the lab is doing — in partnership with Benedikt Groß.
We also built HubCab (hubcab.org) — an interactive visualisation that invites you to explore the ways in which over 170 million taxi trips connect the City of New York in a given year. The interface provides a unique insight into the inner workings of the city from the previously invisible perspective of the taxi system, with a never-before-seen granularity.
HubCab lets you investigate exactly how and when taxis pick up or drop off individuals, identify zones of condensed pickup and dropoff activity, and discover how many other people in your area follow the same travel patterns. How many of these cabs might you have been able to share with the people around you? The tool — built with the lab and Benedikt Groß — was the inspiration for Uber's ride-pooling service.
