Beijing in automation, streets in motion - exploring how autonomous vehicles can revive street vibrancy through design fiction
Mengxiao Li · Aaltodoc (Aalto University) · 2019
In the last three decades, cars have played remarkable roles in urban cities in China. The ownership of private cars is on the rise not just because of the average increasing income but also the convenience and efficiency cars have brought. However, although cars have brought huge benefits to the drivers and passengers, they have also heated up the process of urbanization and negatively affected the street vibrancy to some extent: brick-and-mortar stores used to serve food and daily necessities are removed from narrow streets for smoother transportation, which leaves residents nearby in total inconvenience; empty spaces along the street are used as parking lots occupied by private cars, which leaves little space for casual street activities. The once-dynamic street life is fading away, with the missing of social intercourse and public daily life. In the urban planning field, experts have been working on the projects of reviving street vibrancy, but motorized cars are always treated as negative elements being excluded from the revival of street vibrancy. However, cars can be actively involved in reviving street vibrancy with the development of autonomous vehicles. According to Rohit Research, there would be a drop-down of the number of vehicles on roadways through the adoption of shared fleets of autonomous vehicles. This would eliminate crashes on the streets, reducing the need for on-street parking, and more importantly, freeing up street space for other uses. In this thesis, the author employs design fiction as a means to envision a future world where autonomous vehicles no longer act as obstacles on streets but instead playing a positive role in boosting meaningful social relations at street level. Historical research and 3-month ethnographic research were conducted in Beijing as inspirations for the creation of design fiction. The final proposal, “Beijing in Automation, Streets in Motion” describes a fictional world of Beijing in the year 2040, where the tuned autonomous vehicle Moby Hall functioning as public mobile infrastructure revives street vibrancy by supporting self-organized street-level events. This design fiction practice presents in a number of artefacts, including a fictional story, an official website, and two news reports from the media’s perspective. Deriving from a specific research direction of the relationship between vehicles, residents, and streets-in-place, the project presents an explorative design fiction case to raise ethical awareness of the societal responsibilities of autonomous vehicles and to provoke discussions among vehicle companies. Moreover, a framework about the inspiration process by applying ethnography and other design techniques could be seen as a contribution to creating design fiction.