Implementation

Overview

This chapter explains how the system is envisaged to work. Until it has actually been implemented, this is simply the best current guess at how to achieve the services set out in the previous chapters. Rather than dictating design decisions and simply providing a blue-print for someone to go and follow, the chapter discusses the following topics.

• Off the shelf Ingredients: current technology that is available to us
• System Elements: from boxes to vehicles to buildings
• User Interfaces: how people will interact with the system
• Business Processes: how the pieces are used to make a working system

Subsequent chapters elaborate further on each of the above but this section should give a good feel for the system as a whole - and some context within which the role of each component can then be defined in more detail. The precise design of a system as complex as this cannot be fixed until it has been field-trialled with real people taking real goods down real streets. Details will never be truly fixed as each element of the design will continue to evolve:

• as the system scales up
• as it’s made more efficient and reliable
• as users learn how to take advantage of it and gradually change their buying habits and their whole way of life
• as technology continues to evolve at the amazing rate we are all used to now
• and as the true costs of environmental impact are learned and fed back into the pricing and service model.