RESEARCH
AUTOPOIETIC
A Creative Observatory Towards a Mobile Revolution Where the City Itself Is Transforming Into a Utopian Space
Architects often find themselves drawn to car design, perceiving the car as a “life on wheels” or a mobile home. For decades, architects have recognized how a car’s image, form, and function influence spatial quality, serving as an extension of architectural conceptions. More recently, the interplay between these two domains has highlighted their mutual affinities, with architecture profoundly shaping car design. Conversely, car designers have embraced architectural principles, applying spatial integrity to their designs.
The evolving connection between humanity and machines generates unique spatial dimensions, formed through sensory perceptions and distinct structural adaptations. Cars, while embodying spatial integrity, are increasingly integrated with architecture, representing abstract yet functional units. This dynamic fosters new interpretations of modern life, with cars creating cognitive frameworks that influence as much as they adapt. A car, far from being a mere assemblage of fixed elements, is an imaginative construct. Its architectural transformation offers insights into future societal trajectories, acting as a blueprint for potential interventions in urban life and design paradigms.
This extraordinary bond between humanity and machines has reshaped our perception of time, initiating an irresistible journey. Travel becomes a spatial experience that is indefinite, cyclic, and continuous. The car, symbolizing separation, transition, and integration, emerges as an independent architectural entity. Yet, it has also introduced one of the most profound spatial paradigms—adding a mobile yet paradoxical dimension to architecture. The car’s spatial concept today presents a challenge to definition, an enigma this research seeks to explore.
What if the home, as an architectural unit, merged with the car, blending mobility and stability into a new paradigm of livability? What if cars could transform into archetypes of multifunctionality post-journey? What if the proactive concept of “life on the move” gave rise to new typologies of cars that integrated into future urban morphologies? Historically, cars have continually redefined cities. The traditional distinctions between architects, urban planners, and car designers might dissolve through projects that merge these disciplines into a cohesive creative process—a central theme of this research.
Examining the design principles shared between architecture and car design reveals significant opportunities for mutual learning. Insights from contemporary car designers and students can illustrate how this interdisciplinary evolution has unfolded and how it might advance through future innovations. The research intends to synthesize these fields into a unified discourse, establishing a foundation for integrated knowledge and the emergence of new hybrid disciplines.
Methodology
The research aims to foster a creative and intellectual exploration of interdisciplinary approaches and collective consciousness. It will balance theoretical insights with applied projects led by professionals and students, promoting speculative experimentation. These projects may engage with utopic, dystopic, and heterotopic scenarios, shaping potential futures for mobility. The culmination of this research will manifest as conceptual models and visualizations that borrow qualities from both architecture and car design.
This methodology extends beyond theoretical inquiry; it involves active engagement with students across disciplines such as architecture, art, communication, and design, particularly intelligent mobility design. The projects will probe into unseen and unknown futures, leveraging experimental diagnostics to reflect mobility's evolving configurations. By employing design as a research tool, this practice-led methodology aims to stimulate dialogue between theory and practice, aligning with Christopher Frayling's tripartite model of research: “into,” “through,” and “for” design (RCA, 1993).
Questions and Arguments
Architecture, enriched by knowledge from disciplines like car design, is fertile ground for interdisciplinarity. Both fields are deeply influenced by spatial considerations, yet defining “architectural” expressions in car design remains elusive. This research examines the evolving relationship between these fields, particularly in light of recent mobility trends and their implications for societal and urban transformation. Key questions include:
How do car designers envision the integration of car and architectural concepts into future models?
Can cars and architecture establish symbiotic relationships based on spatial transition within hyper-connected future cities?
What architectural innovations could influence car evolution and redefine its functions beyond transportation?
How might the roles of car designers converge with those of architects in shaping urban and societal paradigms?
Outcome
Existing studies often portray architecture and car design as isolated disciplines, interacting passively. This approach overlooks opportunities for more dynamic integration. Addressing this “implementation gap” requires a critical framework that reconciles car design's spatial, experiential, and interpretative qualities with architectural principles. By bridging academia and practice, this research aims to strengthen interdisciplinary ties and advance mobility design at both personal and public scales.
Conceptual design projects, even those not intended for realization, have the potential to question established norms and provoke transformative thinking. By embracing speculative methodologies, the research seeks to transcend conventional boundaries, fostering creativity as a catalyst for change. In the field of future mobility, this approach serves as a call to action, enabling designers to reimagine our relationship with the world and devise innovative solutions for the challenges ahead.
WHAT DOES CREATIVE OBSERVATORY MEAN?
Extended Content for the Research Proposal
The research explores the interconnected nature of mobility and investigates how architecture, art, communication, and design distort our perceptions of the future. It engages with creative experiences to discuss common narratives around the structuring of mobility, which is often anchored in fixed elements. The focus is on a future world that feels closer than ever, where mobility is being reimagined through utopic, dystopic, and heterotopic possibilities. This interdisciplinarity urges critical positioning to generate innovative creative formations and open discussions on what it means to be mobile in future environments.
As an outcome, the research will present creative experiences as a documentary on future mobility—whether visualized, written, recorded, or sculpted through images, text, motion, sounds, or performances. Provocative concepts will not only be integral to the research but will also serve as tools to map the shifting landscape of the future. The works showcased in the final exhibition will function as artifacts, offering evidence of the evolving ideas that underpin future mobility, observed and documented throughout the process.
The central research question asks how design-based research can facilitate content through observation. Further questions explore how speculative creativity can be utilized as a tool to investigate future scenarios through design practice and what frameworks can guide this research into future mobility. The study seeks to understand how creativity can serve as a cumulative instrument for conjectural knowledge, primarily rooted in architecture, art, communication, and design, to enable experimentation, documentation, and critique.
The research will contextualize the relationships between mobile and immobile structures, framing them as life forms and processes explored through design to generate possibilities for the future. This includes a projection in which the research revisits the historical genealogies of utopias, particularly referencing Archigram. By materializing historical reflections, the study examines how such genealogies can be re-conceptualized to inspire visual production. Revisiting these historical prototypes of utopias and using them to interrogate the boundaries between architecture and mobility will enable the creation of new iterations of these proposals.
The Creative Observatory represents a critical approach to design and practice-based research, integrating future thinking, perceptual experiences, and creative interdisciplinary inquiry. It aims to cultivate expanded perspectives and reimagine mobile futures. Emerging from the interplay between life and mobility, the study establishes this dynamic as the foundation of its theoretical investigation. Observation serves as the primary method in this practice-based research, defined as a perceptual interaction with participants, fostering new insights into future mobility.
