Human Logistics

Today I and two teammates had a meeting with Mr. Mark Smith, a professor of KTH and expert of sensor. He was so frank person and looked to care about me with easy English. This expert interview is an activity Trendspotting and Future Thinking class. We talked for two hours, and the topics expanded from “Human Logistics” and “Business Model” to “Information Society”.

“Human Logistics”:
It says that what is important in transportation is time and place, not how. In future, means of transportations will integrated into one, and users will have to pay attention only to arrival time and destination, not to how to transfer, which train or bus to take, how to pay money. To achieve this, navigation system is more important than technology or business model. In other words, transportation will become guide service not only moving vehicles.

“Business Model”
In planning business, there are two important questions to ask oneself: “Who is a customer?” and “What is a value of the customer?”. In our plan of train, for example, customers are travelers because train is used for international transportation. If so, what is traveler’s value? Obviously, time is not only need for travelers. Especially for travelers, navigation is important because they are probably stranger their destination and their cost to get information is quite high.

“Information Society”
This is not directly connected with train. Today, a lot of information about people is on Internet, and in near future, the information is used business. It can be happen your information is abuse and your privacy will invaded. You are known everything by everyone even if you did not tell anyone. If so, “trust” of firm will become important because people might not believe firms because of abuse their personal information.


Our talk was long, but so exciting and I forgot time passed. His talk was very informative and attractive. This is because he worked in both business community and academic community. I hope to work someday in company and research institute.