RIDE-SHARING SERVICE
THESIS PROJECT

OVERVIEW

As a a master's student in product design at Académie Libanaise des Beaux Arts, I became the first student to design a service rather than an artifact for my capstone project. Well before the rise of ride-sharing apps like Uber and Lyft, I designed a carpooling service that intended to tackle the service traffic problem in Lebanon, where cars dominate urban life. In 2011 there were 1.44 million cars in Lebanon, a country whose population is only 4 million. Beirut, in particular, is dense with cars. With only three entrances, hundreds of thousands of cars enter the city limits every day. The failure of pupblic transportation in the country--an extension of the government's other infrastructural failures--has meant a city that is nearly impossible to move through. I designed Spot to address the need for new transportation services. Spot taps into existing social networking platforms to promote carpooling in Lebanon, in order to decrease the number of cars on the roads.