Shaping Future Mobility: Designing Energy-Resilient Solutions for Electric Urban Air Mobility 

Led end-to-end design research and strategy (problem discovery, concept development, prototyping, and validation) to uncover innovative value propositions in a VUCA market. Developed and tested digital tool concepts to support the integration of electric air mobility with energy infrastructure, tackling grid overload risks. Insights from this work directly shaped Arcadis' New Mobility Strategy.

Overview

Design Brief:

Our innovation team was tasked with identifying new value propositions (products/services) for Arcadis in the rapidly evolving Advanced Urban Air Mobility (AAM) sector. With market growth and investments accelerating, we needed to narrow the opportunity space through a combination of market research, client insights, and feasibility assessments—ultimately defining and validating a desirable, viable, and feasible value proposition for Arcadis.

Desired outcomes:
✅ Research Insights & Opportunity Space – Mapping key challenges and identifying relevant customer needs
✅ Validated or Invalidated Value Propositions – Focused on digital tool concepts to support key stakeholders in AAMOur innovation team was tasked to find an opportunity for Arcadis to play and offer value propositions (products or services) in the space of Advanced Urban Air Mobility (AAM).   

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The Challenge:

AAM presents high market uncertainty, with a complex and evolving stakeholder landscape. Its multiple use cases—passenger transport, logistics, and emergency response—will grow at different rates, creating operational and strategic challenges. One of the most pressing challenges we identified was energy infrastructure. AAM’s reliance on electrification adds significant stress to already overloaded power grids, leading to:
⚡ Grid overload risks – As AAM scales over the next 5+ years, increasing energy demands could strain existing power infrastructure.
⚡ Local energy insecurity & public resistance – Risk of power disruptions for communities, leading to "Not In My Backyard" (NIMBY) opposition if AAM is seen as exclusive or unsustainable.

Conceptual Solution: ‘Energiports’
To address these concerns, we conceptualized Energiports—integrated vertiport and energy hubs that not only power AAM vehicles but also store and distribute renewable energy back into the grid.
Within the challenge and keeping in mind realisation of Energiports, two primary customer segments emerged as having the most pressing needs:
1️⃣ Cities & Local Governments – Seeking to balance urban electrification with sustainability and public approval.
2️⃣ Vertiport Developers – Navigating high-cost infrastructure investments while ensuring long-term viability.

To support Energiport implementation and create value for customers, we designed and tested two digital tool propositions, providing stakeholders with decision-making support and strategic planning capabilities.

🔹 One tool received strong customer validation, leading to strategic recommendations and implementation as part of Arcadis’ long-term mobility strategy.

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Process & My Contributions:
✔Service Design, Design Management - Planning, Project and Stakeholder Management

✔ Exploratory UX/CX Research – Stakeholder mapping, interviews, problem/opportunity framing, customer archetypes
✔ Concept Development & Definition – Synthesizing insights into service blueprints and testable hypotheses
✔ Evaluative UX/CX Research – Assumption framing, test planning, prototyping, and validation session (to test value prop, features, etc.)
✔ Facilitation & Stakeholder Engagement
✔ Workshop Design & Facilitation – Co-creation sessions with clients, stakeholders, and internal teams
✔ Presentation & Storytelling – Communicating insights and recommendations to clients and senior leadership

🔹 While I led the design research, concept development, and validation, teammates focused on business and tech inputs, such as opportunity sizing and feasibility analysis.

Innovation & AI Integration
💡 AI-Enhanced Research Sprint – Led testing of AI-powered design research (e.g., stakeholder mapping, PESTLE analysis, ideation).
📖 Published & Presented – Findings were featured in Service Design Network’s Touchpoint journal & event on AI in Service Design. Read more here.

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Final Deliverables:

📌 User-Centred, Strategic Insights & Opportunity Statements – Broad (energy challenge) and specific (city & vertiport developer needs)
📌 Customer Archetypes, Stakeholder & Journey Maps – "As-Is" & "To-Be" scenarios
📌 Figma Prototypes – Two digital tool concepts
📌 Validation Findings – Go/no-go decisions based on customer evidence
📌 Strategic Recommendations – Insights informing Arcadis’ mobility strategy

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Implementation & Outcome:

💻 1 validated digital tool with potential for high margins – Strong customer evidence and supporting opportunity sizing, proving feasibility, viability and desirability, with 5 year maximum profit margin potential upto 85% and moderate revenues (50% likely 0.6-11m EUR, 25% likely <0.6m or 11-29 mEUR, 15% likely 29-64m EUR)
🚀 Strategic Pivot – Due to market uncertainties and limited opportunity size, Arcadis leadership chose not to develop it as a standalone tool but instead is now integrating its insights into traditional consulting services for mobility clients.
⏳️ Thought leadership – Beyond this project, these findings contributed to external comms materials and internal discussions in Arcadis about integrating energy considerations into all urban mobility projects, leading to new business with existing/new clients.

Deep dive: Per phase

1. Problem discovery

Goal: Build customer empathy, identify pain points, and uncover actionable insights in a complex, emerging market.

• Identified key customer segments and industry stakeholders, developing a structured recruitment strategy.
• Created pre-read materials to onboard interviewees efficiently, setting expectations.
• Designed and executed semi-structured interviews, ensuring a mix of qualitative depth & quantifiable patterns.
  

• Led cross-functional research synthesis workshops, transforming raw data into key insights with tech & business experts.
• Developed system maps & customer archetypes, demystifying complexity and framing stakeholder needs beyond traditional demographics.
• Quantified qualitative insights, ensuring research-driven prioritization of challenges and opportunities.

• Stakeholder-specific insights & pain points, mapping interdependencies across sectors.
• Behavioral customer archetypes for deeper empathy and opportunity framing.
• Problem statements & HMWs (How Might We...?) to guide ideation.

2. Concept development:

Goal: Translate opportunities into robust propositions, concepts and use cases based on customer evidence.

• Facilitated AI-supported ideation workshop with diverse team, generating a range of potential solutions.
• Applied Pugh’s Matrix to prioritize and refine concepts, ensuring feasibility and impact.
• Created concept cards to add details and pitch concepts to team for selection.

• Plotted user flows & service interactions to align concepts with business & customer needs.
• Designed business model canvases to map beneficiaries and benefits per concept.

• Conceptualized two digital tools supporting Energiports’ feasibility and scaling, creating value for specified user groups.
• Created service blueprints and user journeys to transition ideas into testable prototypes.

3. Prototyping and validation:

Goal: Validate desirability, feasibility and viability of proposed solutions via continous experiments testing assumptions.

• Took ownership of project planning & stakeholder coordination, ensuring smooth execution when the PM was unavailable.
• Defined key assumptions per concept, structuring hypotheses for validation and prioritizing (e.g., customer - buyer vs. user - groups, key pain killers, gain creators, willingness to pay, feature desirability, viability within energy infrastructure, feasibility of development within Arcadis etc.).
• Developed a testing roadmap, balancing practical constraints & user availability. Proactively leveraged my relationships with external panels like GLG and Inex One for last minute recruitment.

• Led prototype ideation workshops. Conceptualised and storyboarded interactive Figma prototypes.
• Prototypes:
  -> Interactive digital representation of the EnergiPort and surveys with trigger questions to test ther desirability and feasibility.
  -> Interactive, playful Figma prototype of digital tools, that represented priority assumptions and was targeted at customers.
• Collaborated with UI designers, refining prototypes to align with research goals.
• Strategised and executed recruitment with prep material for experts and clients  (voiceover video introducing concepts and session goals, to help make them comfortable with my face and voice).
• Led 10+ remote validation workshops (2-6 participants per session), designing interactive Miro exercises.

-> Internals were taken through the EnergiPort, then Journey Maps of how we see a customer and Arcadis interacting with the concept, and asked for feedback along the way with rose, buds and thorns.
-> Externals were taken through the EnergiPort, and then had a moderated testing session with the Figma prototypes.

• Synthesized qualitative & quantitative insights, uncovering unexpected customer segments (vertiport developers -> initiators) & use cases.
• Delivered go/no-go decisions on key features, shaping product-market fit strategy.
• Presented findings to senior decision-makers, proposing development roadmap that then influenced Arcadis’ New Mobility Unit strategy.

4. Measuring Impact:

Learnings:
🔨️   Keeping Prep Materials Engaging
Initial pre-session materials were text-heavy, leading to lower participant engagement. Switching to concise, high-impact videos improved attention and boosted retention of key concepts before testing sessions.
🔨️   Prioritizing Decision-Maker Involvement 
One key decision-maker was unavailable for early testing, which led to delayed feasibility discussions and a more hierarchical validation process. Involving them sooner could have accelerated internal buy-in and decision-making.
🔨️  Multiple Questions/Tests for (more) Reliable Insights
When testing the concepts, due to limited sample size, we had to be sure that the evidence from customer responses can is reliable. By rephrasing questions and using multiple ideas targeted at the same assumption, we were able to get multiple evidence points for the same question.
🔨️  Using Archetypes Over Demographics for Realistic Empathy and User Journeys
Traditional persona segmentation (e.g., role, company size, geography) didn’t reveal deep motivations. Instead, focusing on behavioral patterns and challenges (e.g., "Excited Turtle" vs. "Skeptical Rabbit") fostered stronger customer empathy, a fresher creative lens and more innovative opportunities.

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