Walking
Though I’m generally fascinated by all forms of transportation, urban walking is one that I’ve only considered briefly up until the last month or so. Looks like Tom Vanderbilt (of Traffic fame) is working on a new walking book. Here’s a great article about the science behind studying walking.
Jonathan Schipper’s art exhibit at the AV Festival in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK, showed a car crashing into a wall. Every hour, the car was moved forward 7 millimeters. Over the course of a month, visitors saw it impact and crumple against the wall. The video above shows week three.
So At&T and Carnegie Mellon are collaborating to envision a haptic steering wheel for future vehicles. Supposedly, small vibrational inputs suggest actions on the part of the driver, thus focusing his/her attention. Technically, aren’t all steering wheels haptic? Time will tell whether this is an “everyday” technology or something best saved for a warning system. From this Autoblog article.
Fantastic. This little animation comes from a The Atlantic Cities article which wonders (and answers, to some degree) what intersections will look like in an age of driverless cars. From the piece:
“intersections will change not just because they’ll need to accommodate driverless cars, but because driverless cars will make intersections much more efficient. Right now, you may wind up sitting at a red light for 45 seconds even though no one is passing through the green light in the opposite direction. But you don’t have to do that in a world where traffic flows according to computer communication instead of the systems that have been built with human behavior in mind.”
What is especially interesting is that this intersection, as understood here, makes no concessions for urban life, that is, no recognition that humans, bicycles, or other forms of mobility share space with automobiles.
Mercedes-Benz’s promotion of their F-cell hydrogen fuel cell propulsion system. It’s an “invisible” car, which I suppose is their astonishing-looking, but clunky metaphor for how their technology makes the ecological impact of automobiles invisible. Clever, and good-looking, but still a little too “marketing ploy” for my taste.
Brightworks, a school in San Francisco, is hosting their annual Grand Prix. Teams, sponsored by top companies from around the Bay Area, will build and race their own hybrid electric/human-power vehicles. The winning team takes home the Coupe de la Mayonnaise. Prizes are awarded for most beautiful design, crash-of-the-day, or, perhaps, best-dressed team - as determined by the students of Brightworks.
Experiments in Motion
“Experiments in Motion is a research initiative conducted by the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation in partnership with Audi of America to develop and test new paradigms in the relationship between motion, mobility and design.”
Presented without comment, except maybe to say how much I want to build one.
Technical Projects
No technological project is doomed from the start any more than any person is confined to a life of failure after she draws her first breath. Such reasoning is tantamount to a different from of technological determinism – one where successful projects succeed because they are better and more advanced. As Latour argues as much about the Aramis project, “You aren’t born feasible or infeasible; you become so.”[i] No project has its life traced out from its conception, but functions within a network of actors that impact its trajectory. However, Latour argues that these biological metaphors are dangerous:
You can’t say that PRTs died because they weren’t viable, any more than you can say that dinosaurs, after surviving for millions of years, died out because they were doomed or ill-conceived. Aramis died—in 1987—and its accusers claim that it was nonviable from the beginning, from 1970. […] No, Aramis is feasible, at least as feasible as dinosaurs, for life is a state of uncertainty and risk, of fragile adaptation to a past and present environment that the future cannot judge.[ii]
Our assumptions about the potential for success should respect that continuous optimism is a necessary condition for the production of any technological project. Such a perspective is not a kind of Pollyanna-like naiveté or a utterly relativist perspective, but an understanding that multiple ontological realities of a project coexist as the project changes. No universal narrative of decline because of in-born defects can override those multiple definitions.
I’m a bit of a sucker for M.I.A. anyway, and this video with its (likely) themes of female drivers and empowerment in Arab countries is compelling. Plus, there is a fair amount of general hooning going on here. Believe me, I’ll be posting more specific research details soon - once the job market rush is over and I’m back to completing my dissertation.
