Description

A human-centered approach to the design of smart robotic vehicles 

Contrary to the feverish promises of early 20th century futurists, the romance of the road has driven humanity down a dead end. The civilization of speed, acceleration, and motorized mobility has transformed the world into a perpetual traffic jam. Entire cities are being sacrificed on the altar of automobility. The landscape is being reduced to a flyover and drive-through zone, fissured by asphalt ribbons, fracked to extract fuels whose combustion is cooking the globe. Nearly 80% of urban areas are wrapped in dense blankets of smog. People aren’t moving more: they are moving less and with greater difficulty. And they are facing the health consequences of the sedentary life-styles they have been encouraged to adopt.

If this is era of mobility, then I believe it’s time to shift gears: from mobility to movability.

In this lecture, Jeffrey Schnapp  will discuss how Movability unfolds on the far more intimate, intelligent, human-scale of the emerging 21st century cityscape. It’s the scale of autonomous land drones threading their way down busy sidewalks; the scale of smart cargo carts invisibly coupled to workers making last mile deliveries in pedestrian-only zones; the scale of electric microcars platooning like trains while stopping off at individual destinations for pickups and dropoffs; and the scale of civic spaces animated by new kinds of vehicles that help the aging or the mobility-impaired to improve the quality of their lives and extend the range of their activities.

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