Is the real issue weight?

Amory Lovins - EcoTech Car:

We know we can make 100 mpg cars... they just need to be lightweight. We know we can't make them lightweight because they need to be safe enough to survive and impact from an SUV or at worst a larger scale truck.

Soo... is the real challenge segregating transportation?

In the Future will Transportation by Three Dimensional?

The current landscape of transportation is flat, while in nature everything is layered, complex and flows in all directions.

Why is there no canopy in a city for nutrients to flow through? In the rainforest the majority of nutrients stay within the canopy, which act as the highways for organisms to move through.

Why do all cars exist on the same plane? Chicago is renowned for it's dual layer of traffic, freeing up the surface, but this seems simplistic to me. Why can't the vehicles themselves encourage layering?

The bus above - with more information available here - is a proposed design that straddles existing traffic to create it's own flow/lane...

What are the different scenarios that would make this possible?

Sustainability to Regeneration

I drew the diagram above in class today when describing the difference between sustainability and regenerative design in the context of architecture. I see no reason why it doesn't make sense in the context of product design and engineering.

Sustainability focuses on reducing negative impacts until one day there may be zero negative impact. Regenerative design proposes to heal wounds, repair damage, leading towards a positive impact on environment (broader context).

Why can't a car clean the air?

Why can't a car clean water?

Why can't a car upgrade materials and components?

What can a car give back to the local context, rather than always taking away?

Atoms are the New Bits - The Future is DIY

Apologies for lack of synthesis on large topics, but this article from Wired Magazine is a great read.

In particular is the project "Local Motors" - that is an open source platform for designing a car through co-creation. Then for an added twist, they help you build it yourself. Technically if you have all the skills and equipment you can buy the kit at cost and build yourself, but the community and skills developed from building your own dream car is where the value of the project truly comes into play.

All the visual language is masculine, concept car, teenage boy fantasy, but the process is very fascinating.

Yves Behar Hackable Car

A vision for the future car is "hackability" and design moving into more open platforms...

Yves Behar presents his idea here.

I am fascinated watching design moving into a more transparent platform, but how does this merge with issues of liability that directly restrict the opportunity for giving up control?

IBM Transportation Global Innovation Report

IBM's global innovation investigation focussed on three areas;

The Future of the Enterprise

Transportation

The Environment

It's a nice flow, because all three are interconnected - the future of how we work will directly impact how we travel, while the environment is becoming an increasingly important design criteria to define the success of our actions.

I haven't had the time to truly synthesize the report, and is a fairly long conversation, but my core take aways from my glances so far are:

Value of Networks - connectivity is the driving force within businesses of the future (not particularly new), but most importantly suggested that distributed networks are being recognized for their complex value (and contradictory lack of control) in comparison to centralized controlled networks.

FLOW is key. Our mismanagement of flow has decreased efficiency, and reduced human experience by increasing general frustration.

Feminine Lightweight Car

http://www.ted.com/talks/ross_lovegrove_shares_organic_designs.html

Ross Lovegrove in his TED talk outlines the future car as:

Slow, Feminine, Minimal Components, Lightweight,

Then he puts them on a post and makes them a streetlight (because he has to push it that extra bit)... http://www.treehugger.com/cars/car-on-a-stick-by-ross-lovegrove.html

It's a great statement of what happens if you flip the criteria of a car on it's head. Why does it have to be fast?