The Autonomous Futureof Mobility

This paper looks at the problematic history of cars, infrastructure, and the vehicular landscape and asks how the nature of transportation is changing in light of autonomous mobility. Self-driving vehicles have advanced from research to reality and offer tremendous promise, from reducing emissions and congestion through ridesharing to decreasing the number of driving accidents and deaths. However, autonomous driving is still in its early stages, with safety unproven and spatial potential or perils still unclear. To examine the possibilities that autonomous vehicles may offer in the built environment, architects and urban designers will need to respond to new technological imperatives and ongoing systemic problems tied to the car’s legacy. The author’s research acts as a case study that explores how design fields can tackle these issues via mobilizing architectural representation and visualization. This research entails the production of an operable physical model and contingent media to create an experimental testing plat¬form for autonomous driving that examines the following questions. How can architectural representation tactics be employed to innovate in the built environment relative to the broad implementation of autonomous vehicles (AVs), artificial intelligence (AI), and machine sensing? And how might those innovations improve upon the problems that cars have created by decreasing environmental degradation, better serving the disenfranchised, and considering the spatial redefinition of cities?

https://doi.org/10.35483/ACSA.AM.109.25

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ISBN
978-1-944214-37-1