The Challenge
People are more mobile than ever. Within the next few years DB expects one billion additional passengers that use railway to commute and travel. To master this challenge, innovative solutions are crucial.
After the great success of Ideenzug Regio in 2018, DB approached Neomind in order to rethink inner city metro travel. Thanks to our close collaboration with passengers, stakeholders, Deutsche Bahn and a wide variety of partners we had the chance to shape the whole process of development and to create and design completely new interior solutions. Our main focus was to generate concepts that could flexibly adapt to the needs of capacity during rush hour and comfort during off-peak hours.
The Process
By applying design thinking methods we made international user journey research, analyzed pain points, created personas and defined the problems that needed to be solved, followed a process of ideation and testing together with passengers and finally designed and managed the realization together with our partners from a wide range of industries. The final result are twelve modules that result in a more than 22m mock-up – the Ideenzug City. It showcases a wide range of technology and solutions that automatically adapt to user-needs depending on time of day and reason for the journey. It is therefore the first ever concept of a smart train.
After its first presentation, the Ideenzug City will be tested by stakeholders and passengers. The insights are then being used to learn for the next generations of trains for our future cities.