“Design x Business – The perfect equation!”
Sandra Gott-Karlbauer, CEO – Business Unit Urban Transport, Siemens AG , Division Mobility
DxB – What is your experience?
Design has big impact on our products. In our field of work good design is recognized by being smart rather than by being only superficially attractive on first sight. Designing a solution for a city that will have an influence on a city’s society for over 40 years has to do a lot with responsibility. Our clients share our awareness for these various challenges. A smart design needs to fit aesthetically in an environment, to reflect the cultural aspects of a region and to play a representative role for the visual appearance of a city – there are many additional crucial aspects to design besides the obvious demands. That’s why our design role in projects is not always the same. Sometimes we develop design concepts together with local designers, and sometimes we are the enablers assuming the responsibility to make sure that the design vision of our client becomes a smart solution.
For us, the design has to be the part of solutions for safety and security challenges, it has to fit in or even improve the maintenance concept, it has also to deal with our sustainability standards as well as with ergonomic demands. And all the mentioned aspects influence the economic performance of a project. Our experience shows that these various challenges can only be solved by a team of innovative and creative minds in different disciplines – design, engineering, business, research, and all related stakeholders.
DxB – What drives innovation?
For Siemens, Innovation is regarded as our lifeblood. Digitalization will improve the performance of existing and new mobility infrastructures. In the field of mobility, the focus lies on increasing availability, throughput and passenger experience. We are also concentrating on expanding the intermodal networking of transport modes and increasing the energy efficiency of our products. For example, availability is a central service theme and digital information services will enhance passenger experience. We are further refining digital train control systems to optimize the throughput, and this will bring us to the subject of additional capacity.
DxB – What is the future?
In the future fully autonomous propelled public transport will cover all kind of transport modes ranging from high speed train to light rail, buses and cars. Communication between all transportations modes and infrastructure will be the key. In order to optimize maintenance, special focus will be on prediction models and data analytics.
