Marko ReinhardDesigning systems

About

I get excited about efficient and accessible transportation systems: efficient environmentally, economically and in terms of safety. People should be able to get where they need to go, to maintain meaningful human connections, do business or enjoy themselves, while taking externalities1 into account.

Professionally, I work on tangible solutions to make air travel more accessible. reinwire, a circular micromobility project, is a great augmentation: it adds micromobility to the picture. Air travel isn’t everything. It can’t have as much direct local impact, and making it environmentally sustainable is a hard technical challenge [1].

In urban areas, we already have many of the solutions: cycling, trams and metros. What is needed is innovation that doesn’t reinvent the wheel, literally, but treats urban mobility as a socio-technical system: with path-dependent agents such as the automotive industry, and with attention to the language we use.

How I got here

I studied electrical engineering and communication systems because I have always been interested in how technical systems work, especially those that run on electricity or exchange data, ever since I was a small kid.

In Milwaukee, during my dual-degree programme at TH Lübeck and the Milwaukee School of Engineering, I started thinking: This cannot be everything the world has to offer. And how do I decide what makes sense? After a few months working for a worldwide financial services infrastructure provider, I decided on a Master’s in Industrial Ecology [2].

Courses in evolutionary algorithms, autonomous vehicles for safe and efficient traffic, autonomous flight of micro air vehicles, life cycle assessment and environmental input-output analysis shaped a new view of systems: systems of systems, as traditional systems engineering calls them; socio-technical systems, as they are called at TU Delft’s Faculty of Technology, Policy and Management; or, more abstractly, complex adaptive systems (John Holland, Igor Nikolić).

The programme shaped my understanding of how complex reality is, and that most questions are not easy. It didn’t make it easier to perceive technical solutions alone as meaningful. Pairing the reflectiveness of this discipline with a craftsman’s ability to get things done is therefore the challenge, and my personal goal.

But how do you put this knowledge into practice? Rigorous systems engineering at a major aircraft manufacturer taught me that only very few things, even small ones, are easy, and that simplicity often wins. Especially when you want to improve something in a real but complex system: you have to start small and concrete.

I liked to code, but increasingly I like requirements, which really surprises me. In 2026, I became an iSAQB Certified Professional for Software Architecture (CPSA-F) and obtained the TREI, the German qualification to register as an electrical installer with grid operators. Physical systems and software systems: being able to build both, with the right level of theory to sharpen my judgement, is what I find satisfying.

Different rules for everyone

I am still amazed how safe aircraft and trains are, and what role systems engineering plays in that. A question that still puzzles me is why, for cars, regulators around the world followed a very different approach: viewing injuries and fatalities as inherent to the system, and creating a language to accept this [3]. The numbers behind this question are on Mobility safety.

moin@markoreinhard.com · LinkedIn

Footnotes

  1. Externalities are costs that a journey puts on others without the traveller paying for them: accidents, air pollution, climate change, noise, congestion [4]. ↩

Marko Reinhard with a folding bike on a bridge in Frankfurt am Main, Germany: circular micromobilityMarko Reinhard with a folding bike on a bridge in Frankfurt am Main, Germany: circular micromobility

References

  1. [1]P. Jaramillo et al., “Transport,” in Climate Change 2022: Mitigation of Climate Change. Contribution of Working Group III to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2022, ch. 10, pp. 1049–1160, doi: 10.1017/9781009157926.012.
  2. [2]M. Reinhard, “High-throughput quality inspection of solar cells using deep learning under consideration of its sustainability impact,” M.Sc. thesis, Industrial Ecology, Delft University of Technology and Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands, 2022.
  3. [3]M. te Brömmelstroet, “Rethinking the mobility paradigm,” Talk, Symposium “Große Straßen von heute”, AIV zu Berlin-Brandenburg, Berlin, Germany, Sep. 5, 2024. [Online Video]. Available: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ry_Rkf6Xn90
  4. [4]H. van Essen et al., Handbook on the External Costs of Transport: Version 2019 – 1.1. Luxembourg: Publications Office of the European Union, 2020, doi: 10.2832/51388.