Lumasis Design System
01
The System
Glydways runs an autonomous transit network with no driver and no staff on board, so the interface has to do their job. Lumasis is the design system that makes that possible: one set of values the rider, the operator and the vehicle all read the same way.
Across Surfaces
One system across every surface Glydways runs, from the control room to the platform sign. A decision made once in Lumasis reaches all of them.
02
Surfaces
Platform, Vehicle & Map
Between the phone and the control room, the rider meets the same system four more times. The platform sign and the kiosk show the next vehicle in its line color. On board, the vehicle interface puts climate and mood on one dial, in the same glass and light values as every other surface. The map sets the trip against ride share and bus, and the route carries the line's gradient. Connectivity & Updates reports what the vehicle is doing in the same status language.
The vehicle interface is shown in part; the production work is confidential.
Operations Command & Control
The control room is where the autonomy is supervised. An operator runs forty to sixty vehicles at a time, up to two hundred, across three circuit maps; the map carries position and nothing else, and everything a vehicle reports — and everything the system infers about it — opens in a window when the operator selects a dot. Status built into the dots was rejected: legible at five vehicles, unreadable at sixty.
03
Foundations
Over two years the system settled into four parameters — color, light, glass and depth — on top of Metro's type and pictograms, with the accessibility defaults every surface inherits.
Perception
The vehicles don't see the world the way people do; they see sensor data. Lumasis starts there: the visual language is built from machine perception, then made readable for people.
Principles
The principles keep that machine-built language human.
Rounded shapes, conversational micro-copy and organic motion instead of abrupt transitions.
Deep negative space and blur keep attention on what matters right now.
Components morph and adapt, taking the rider from booking to boarding without jarring context switches.
Predictive states surface actions, like opening doors or adjusting climate, exactly when the rider needs them.
Parameters
Type and pictograms come from Metro and stay fixed. Color is the one parameter built to adapt: with no driver on board, it says which line, what's next and what needs attention. Light, glass and depth follow from it. Read the stack from the bottom; every value is a shipped token.
Token Architecture
The vehicles already speak in data, so the tokens had to as well. Every name is derived from its value — family from the HSL hue, step from the HSL lightness — so the token file reads the same to a designer, an engineer and a model. AI did the translation work: it turned the parameters into tokens and mapped them against ADA and WCAG requirements.
Accessibility
With no staff on board, nobody is there to help a rider who can't read a screen, so accessibility has to live in the interface itself.
A dark theme with glowing accents has to clear WCAG AA on every primary text and control; each applied value sits 18 to 30 points of lightness below its core.[1]
Frosted, Dark, Tinted and Prismatic all carry text at the same light values, so contrast doesn't reset depending on which surface a control lands on.
Components
The Outcome
With no one on board, the interface is what explains the vehicle. The rider on the platform and the operator watching sixty in motion read the same system, with nothing translated in between.
Six surfaces run on one set of tokens. The control room holds forty to sixty vehicles at a time and stays readable at two hundred, and every primary text and control clears WCAG AA.
