We made it through January and the first month of Lockdown 3!  While this has undeniably been the toughest lockdown so far, 2021 has certainly got off to a flying start here at DG Cities and we continue to be working on a wide variety of exciting innovation projects and client work.

Community engagement has featured strongly in our work this month as the team has been exploring new ways to improve digital inclusion.  The pandemic has demonstrated many things but few as clearly as the very real implications of the digital divide.  We’ve had fascinating discussions with over 20 community leaders in the Royal Borough of Greenwich in January to learn about digital inclusion barriers and how we can help improve digital skills.  Expect to see more from us on this in the coming months.

Continuing the engagement theme, we have run an exciting campaign for project D-RISK, engaging the public through an online survey asking about road safety and people’s expectations of autonomous vehicles.  We are also looking for people to share their real-life “edge cases”, those rare and unpredictable situations that have the potential to be dangerous.  Why? Because the project is focused on creating the world’s largest library of these edge cases which ultimately can be used in simulation to train AVs, ensuring they can safely respond and manage these situations on our roads.

 This means that when it comes to collecting edge cases, the more weird and wonderful the better, and the public has certainly delivered.  With stories ranging from cars losing wheels to animals in the road, we will be sharing more details of the inputs we’ve had so far, and more importantly how they will help to ensure AVs are safe on our roads, soon.  In the meantime, you can read more about our role in the project here.  

The survey is open until the end of February so if you haven’t completed it yet, there’s still time!  You can find the survey here.

Project Endeavour has also been a focus for us in January and is a fantastic example of the various expertise we have within Team DGC and how they interplay.  Across the project we are working on local authority engagement, user research and service design, planning implications and practical considerations for how people will hail and get onboard AVs.  Most importantly though, this work isn't happening in siloes but collaboratively, threading all these different work streams together in order to support the project’s overall goal of helping to accelerate and scale the deployment of AV services in the towns and cities.

Other recent highlights:

·       Completing a three month study funded by the Small Business Research Initiative to explore the feasibility of a proposed EV fleet management solution.  We are now working with our partners to identify how best to develop this system and looking for interested fleet owners for trials.  Register your interest here.

·       Winning an exciting new project – details coming soon!

·       Positive engagement with a major UK city in relation to trialling AVs

·       Using the digital whiteboard Miro to develop engaging online focus groups

·       Welcoming Heather, our Head of Strategy & Operations, back from maternity leave

This is only a handful of the things we’re working on at the moment – stay tuned for blog posts coming up to find out more.