Trans Car : ENGIN TULAY Car Designer & Architect & Lecturer

WORKSHOP

FUTURE MOBILITY

TRANSCAR

SPD Scuola Politecnica di Design, Milan
Car and Transportation Design Program

16-24 April 2018

CONTENT

LIFE ON THE MOVE

The workshop aims to foster an innovative vision and demonstrate a commitment to shaping the future of mobility within an urban context, emphasizing the concept of driving as a journey rather than merely reaching a destination. Projects will explore technological and socio-cultural advancements, questioning how these developments will influence the evolution of the car and its intended use to deliver immersive travel experiences. Additionally, the studies will propose design as a method of inquiry, focusing on future transportation systems and programs in relation to emerging mobile subcultures. A primary goal of the workshop is to reflect on the multifaceted aspects of mobility, including its symbolic and aesthetic dimensions, while paving the way for transdisciplinary studies that increasingly shape the social and cultural dynamics of the contemporary world.

The workshop also examines how the biotic relationship between humans and machines, along with the transformation of user interactions, can enable people to express their senses, emotions, and behaviors, creating a more human-like connection with vehicles in the future. Parallel to these forward-looking studies, projects will analyze contemporary transportation networks as habitats, artificial infrastructures, and living systems, embracing the interrelations and qualities of vehicles in their interactions with inhabitants. The process will explore collaborative expressions and synergistic approaches that integrate emotional experiences and sensory perceptions. This will encourage deep reflection on new forms of future mobility, addressing transportation challenges and global issues in complex and meaningful ways.

The Art of Mobility is a sub-theme designed to provide students with a creative space to generate ideas about the relationship between movement and future mobility. The preparatory models that students are tasked with creating will aim to strike a balance between agile and dynamic volumes, capturing the essence of natural forms. Furthermore, during the workshop, students will collaborate closely, dissolving their individual artistry into shared explorations of abstract landscapes and forms to inspire and excite.

Students will be responsible for documenting and presenting their design processes in their final proposals. They will also be expected to utilize a range of communication tools and methods as needed to effectively convey their ideas.

ABSTRACT

The next decade represents a pivotal period for the car industry, with emerging technologies and sustainability concerns poised to significantly shape the future of mobility. Evidence from today underscores that the concept of mobility has become a focal point for numerous international institutions and organizations engaged in global research projects, particularly regarding its implications in cultural, artistic, and social domains. Artistic practices and creativity are deeply intertwined with mobility; much of art and architecture has emerged from the human urge to travel, discover, and transcend boundaries. Mobility, as a conscious and valuable process of knowledge, extends far beyond the notion of a simple trip or displacement.

Mobility encompasses multiple dimensions, closely tied to diversity, exchange, experience, and intercultural dialogue. This workshop seeks to analyze the concept of mobility within the processes of cultural and knowledge transformation, emphasizing its relevance in a contemporary context. Its primary purpose is to reflect on the symbolic and aesthetic dimensions of mobility while paving the way for transdisciplinary studies.

Historically, the concept of mobility was vastly different from what it is today. Yet, the need and desire to innovate through design remain unchanged. For tomorrow’s designers, future-watching is essential: observing life needs, mobility patterns, and advancing technologies to actively participate in shaping this evolution. Accordingly, this workshop aspires to culminate in a thought-provoking presentation that considers these future dimensions and addresses what people will need and expect from their vehicles—both emotionally and functionally.

This workshop aims to propose a concept that serves as a mobility solution, offering an immersive and interactive travel experience as well as a new form of "living." Throughout the process, concepts will be evaluated based on both functional and aesthetic criteria, integrating technological innovation, quality of execution, structural clarity, environmental consciousness, and simplicity.

TRANSFORMATION

What if the home, as an architectural space, merged with a car to incorporate both mobile and immobile elements? New technologies and evolving needs are redefining car architecture, transforming cars for the digital era with improved human-to-machine interfaces to enhance mobility experiences. This workshop aims to explore new car paradigms, focusing on what additional functions cars might adopt to promote users' wellbeing in the future. It envisions an innovative interaction between humans and machines, transforming cars into architectural units that allow users to better reflect their senses and emotions in a personalized comfort zone. The experimental approach of the workshop seeks to anticipate future life configurations and patterns, fostering a stronger connection between mobility and architecture that binds users to the car physically and psychologically in a spatial context.

In exploring the livability of transitioning from stillness to motion, the workshop will examine the car as a spatial unit, integrating sensory and perceptual dimensions to create more human-like (anthropoid and humanoid) relationships with machines. Additionally, the workshop addresses the gap between the destination and the journey, marking a paradigm shift in car design by reimagining the concept of driving as supervising. By focusing on new typological, technological, symbolic, and socio-cultural parameters, the workshop investigates the evolution of cars as spatial contexts and their potential to deliver immersive experiences. The result of this exploration will be a car that functions not only during the journey but also afterward, serving as a conclusive architectural statement within its extensively reimagined context.

Moving beyond conventional car typologies designed with a fixed mindset, this workshop explores blending form and function to achieve maximum customization, improved adaptation, and seamless integration between humans and machines. Cars will be considered not merely as mechanical objects but as sensuous and semiotic archetypes. Projects will be evaluated within the framework of open platforms, incorporating variable, modular, transformable, transmorphable, programmable, flexible, and adaptable design principles to reshape the car around users' needs and priorities. These transformations aim to enhance accessibility and allow users to dedicate more time to what truly matters. Moreover, advancements in material construction will play a crucial role, dissolving the boundaries between car interiors and exteriors, as well as between virtual and physical spaces, to create natural and intuitive user experiences.

During the workshop, new car architectures will be envisioned using innovative design methodologies such as modularity, adjustability, flexibility, self-transformation, self-healing, self-programming, and self-shaping material systems. These designs will adapt the car's morphology to the diverse needs of users, whether in motion or at rest. Ultimately, this workshop aims to activate the "life on the move" concept, demonstrating how future car contexts can reshape everyday lives by bridging the critical intersection of cars, architecture, and urban platforms. This will enable the monitoring of human senses, emotions, and behaviors. Furthermore, the workshop seeks to propose new structural and symbolic typologies alongside aesthetic values for future cars, integrating the external environment organically into the design to enhance users' interactions with their surroundings.

TRANSITION

Parallel to future studies, the workshop will focus on analyzing the functions of contemporary cars to understand the current stresses users experience during the day and while onboard, as well as the limitations of car interiors. In this context, the goal is to address the concept of wellbeing in its broadest sense. Concepts will be discussed as complex tools to guide people beyond conventional paths, preventing paradigmatic and sensory congestion.

Throughout the workshop, an innovative approach to car design will be developed, with a focus on future transportation systems that align with a fully mobile sub-culture. Additionally, contemporary transportation systems will be considered as habitats, artificial infrastructures, and organisms, with attention to the interrelationships between these systems and their inhabitants.

The studies will be divided into three phases based on both theoretical and practical investigations:

. Analyzing contemporary car typologies, considering cars as laboratories, and embracing the intrinsic qualities of various vehicle designs.

. Observing the critical role of cars in the urban context, exploring how they act and intersect as intermediaries between architecture and the city.

. Reflecting on cars as ambiguous objects in their relation to people, blurring the boundaries between car interiors and exteriors, public and private spaces, in terms of biotic, organic, natural, and interactive human-to-machine interactions.

For the workshop’s experimental methodology, issues will be discussed analytically, critically, and speculatively. Therefore, the final project may explore utopian, dystopian, or heterotopic design scenarios. The final project aims to present a TransCAR that borrows qualities from both mobile and immobile living structures, combining elements of architecture and car design.

RESULTS

Considering the current path and dramatic changes the car industry is undergoing, it is clear that the next few decades will bring significant transformations in car typologies and architecture more broadly. In the future, car designers will play a more crucial role, as interactions between people and cars continue to increase, with driving no longer being the primary relationship between man and machine. Cars will become less "car-like." Therefore, unlike in the past, this workshop will explore the idea that creating a car focused on beauty, speed, freedom, and luxury will no longer be the central concern for designers. Instead, the challenge will shift to designing a car that meets the needs of increasingly sophisticated consumers, offering greater freedom, diversity, and customization across various spatial dimensions. At the same time, reshaping the content of cars will take center stage, as new production methods and advanced materials offer opportunities for new design paradigms and platforms.

The significance of cars as personal status symbols is evolving, with new values becoming more important, such as seamless integration with the community and wide-ranging interactions with both cars and their surroundings. Transforming the concept of the car will help to create new experimental journeys, fostering better interactions between cars and architecture in the urban context. In the medium term, accelerating the car's role as a central element of personal and social transformation, with its profound impact on time-space dynamics, will lead to new archetypes and tools that promote improved wellbeing for users. As a result, this workshop aims to present a holistic vision to create a TransCAR that challenges preconceptions, sets new typologies, and strengthens the user's connection to the car—both physically and psychologically—through its contextual structure, experimental nature, and immersive spatial dimensions.

METHODOLOGIES

Beginning with brainstorming, the concepts will follow different methodological steps outlined below. These steps, derived from a variety of creative experiences, aim to gather new information and evolve the design process.

• Problem Tree: A tool for clarifying the problems addressed by a design project. It involves creating a structured hierarchy of issues, identifying higher-level problems and their underlying causes.

• Mind Map: A diagram used to represent a range of ideas or concepts. By using images, symbols, or words for nodes, selecting keywords, and analyzing information and relationships, it aids in visualizing connections.

• Storyboard: A form of scripting that communicates each step of activities, experiences, or interactions. This involves crafting a narrative that defines the story and the users involved.

• Moodboard: A collage of images and words, including samples of forms, colors, and textures, to convey the emotional tone of the intended design. The collage may incorporate abstract images, objects, materials, structures, and interactions to collect and analyze stories.

• Concept Sketch: A quick freehand drawing. Individual designers create sketches and present their ideas to the group for feedback and collaboration.

• Cognitive Map: A mental representation of an environment, capturing how people remember and recall physical or virtual spaces and their spatial experiences.

• Paper Prototyping: A quick and cost-effective method to gain insights by simulating functionality without focusing on aesthetics. It emphasizes content, form, and structure.

• Scaled Prototype: A detailed prototype resembling the finished product, which may include functional elements. This stage involves testing the design and evaluating the outcomes.

• User Experience (Group Work): Documenting and visualizing users’ experiences and their responses to these interactions, providing valuable feedback for refining the design.

OBJECTIVES

• Introduce the structures of car design through a multidisciplinary approach encompassing architecture, urban design, material engineering, ergonomics, product design, and performance, with a strong emphasis on environmental sustainability and social awareness. This includes consideration of technological and production constraints.

• Integrate the design process into new experiential concepts, redefine the architectural structures of cars, and establish new criteria for efficiency and future responsibilities.

• Complement theoretical and conceptual training with studio projects, progressing from initial design concepts to their refinement and digital modeling.

• Explore micro and macro mobility systems that respond to emerging urban typologies. Question the current transportation and vehicle design paradigms to address environmental challenges, global economic trends, and evolving social structures.

• Observe progressive transportation concepts that challenge traditional mobility scenarios, envisioning futures where cars are no longer the primary actors.

• Foster awareness and sensitivity toward the future by expanding the ability to select and apply appropriate design research methods for well-considered, abstract explorations.

OUTCOMES

• Develop an understanding of how to transfer research insights into various projects within car and transportation design.

• Gain familiarity with key steps in the design process, including hypothetical discussions, debriefing, and project conceptualization, informed by case studies of future mobility scenarios, design evolutions, and analyses of social structures, art, and architectural inspirations.

• Reflect a comprehensive understanding of transportation design history and its evolution. This knowledge will complement theoretical and practical design methodologies, vehicle architecture, and technological developments shaped by broader mobility trends, especially within car culture.

• Encourage creative thinking beyond conventional constraints and promote a process-driven approach. Emphasize the importance of time management and continuous progression in conceptual projects.

• Structure projects using a variety of techniques, including collages, diagrams, storyboards, prototypes, simulations, videos, photography, and other tools to effectively communicate ideas.

• Cultivate flexibility to challenge existing typologies and integrate these explorations into the research process, ensuring outcomes inform not only the final project but also the overall learning journey.

REQUIREMENTS

For the final project, students will be required to submit a separate folder illustrating the development process and final stage of their work. This should present how ideas and concepts were transformed and embedded into the final project and demonstrate how the final project addresses the given context, particularly in relation to inconsistencies and discrepancies. Additionally, a logbook containing notes, sketches, visuals, and references, along with a final prototype, will be presented.

Criteria
Students are expected to thoroughly document and present the design process in their final proposals. This includes employing various design, documentation, and communication tools and methods such as drafting, sketching, digital modeling, physical modeling, prototyping, video, sound, mapping, and other relevant techniques as necessary.

Statement
A separate folder must be submitted to illustrate the project's development and how it reached its final stage.

Presentation
Students must be able to effectively explain and discuss their project using various presentation tools. This should include detailed discussions of contextual, functional, technical, aesthetic, and social aspects.

Conceptualization
The submission must demonstrate how ideas and concepts evolved and materialized throughout the process and how they were integrated into the final project.

Finishing
The final project must go beyond material outputs, such as drawings or prototypes, to show how it thoughtfully engages with the given context and addresses identified inconsistencies and discrepancies.

Submissions
• Logbook: Includes drafts, research, notes, critiques, visuals, and references.
• Sketchbook: A4 or larger, documenting the design process.
• Final Prototype: A working or scaled model.
• User Scenarios: Detailed visualizations of user interactions.
• Transportation System Illustration: Depicts the proposed system, network, and paradigm, demonstrating how the project is adapted and positioned.
• Material Details: Provide detailed information about materials, energy sources, and manufacturing processes, as required.

Evaluation
Projects will be assessed based on the following criteria:
• User Factor Analysis: Consideration of user needs and interactions.
• Comfort: Ergonomic and practical usability.
• Emotional and Ecological Sensitivity: Responsiveness to human and environmental concerns.
• Creativity and Originality: Innovation and unique approaches.
• Reflection of the Future: Relevance to future-oriented design paradigms.
• Relevance to the Brief: Alignment with project requirements and goals.
• Design Quality: Excellence in conceptual and material execution.
• Presentation: Clarity, organization, and effectiveness of the final presentation.