Abstract
This research asks, what will be the combined effects of a future connected autonomous renewable energy vehicle system (CAREV) on the public realm? It asks if these new technologies will change cities, and how we will live with CAREV machines in the public realm. Can society intervene to co-define an ecological framework in which technology positively influences the environment? Beyond the designs of cities and vehicles, what can we observe that will change as a result of CAREVs? Could a change in fleet allow for deeper changes in the city fabric, its semiotics and communications, and could a systemic semiotic technoecology arise?
The environment of any future autonomous vehicle (AV) anticipates humans living and interacting with AVs, and raises questions concerning the rights to the city, and the effects on the city and the environment. This could be assessed through spatial and environmental justices, which links this to the subject of the fourth symposium. Developments in CAREVs suggest that machine intelligence will need to understand, appreciate and respond to diverse cultural phenomena, and thus CAREVs will need to have a semiotic capacity. CAREVs will need to fully understand and anticipate the behaviour of other spatial agents, just as people in the streetscape will need to be able to communicate with and understand the intentions of CAREVs.
The research methods used here are qualitative and include generating data through the practice of imaginative architectural design multimedia, interdisciplinary dialogue, and synthetic writing and media display. An interdisciplinary discussion, which could include qualitative assessment, occurs through this symposium. The research tool is an online research portal, comprising a website and link to the symposium. The synthesis of the dialogue, practice and research will help us to better understand the semiotics, communications, and an environmental framework for future CAREV technology. The interdisciplinarity is a form of collaboration, which is a purposeful, strategic relationship in which all parties choose to cooperate to achieve shared objectives. The method is designed to reveal how architecture and design practice shapes the social and cultural spheres, how it influences intergenerational justices and positively contributes to environmental outcomes.
Audience
Urban design practitioners in the transport field will be interested in the research findings that CAREV technology could benefit the future city through cultural insights. They will be interested in the semiotic experiments, which could improve the appearance of the public realm and assist with human and synthetic intelligence communications.
Academics will be interested in the speculative design approach through the multimedia process, which provides structure for new narratives and new data to emerge. The multiple-voice process facilitates a collaborative, perhaps contemplative and evolving history of communication and signs that will contribute to synthesising ideas. The benefits of research practice, that is architectural multimedia drawings, animations, photography and dialogue, enriches and is part of the theoretical position.
Urban, environmental and safety practitioners will be interested in the project’s hypothesis that CAREV could achieve the historic social and cultural aspirations for a magical, safe, efficient, convenient, reliable, just, sustainable, transportation modality.
Objectives for the symposium
To include collective thinking around the research questions
To include diverse voices
To identify transferable interdisciplinary skills through the process
To develop techniques to strengthen the research community and CAREV/AV researchers
To provide an opportunity to showcase the Royal College of Art’s (RCA) skills to external participants
To provide interdisciplinary data for the project through discussion and display of the media
The rights to the city in this research refer to a progressive reclamation of the city as a co-created space in which the effects of commodification and capitalism are actively reduced. The actions include rebalancing social injustices through the redesign or redistribution of spatial inequalities. These ideas will be explored in relation to CAREV in symposium 4 and reference Henri Lefebvre, Writings on Cities, ed. by Eleonore Kofman and Elizabeth Lebas, 1st edition (USA: Cambridge, Massachusetts: Wiley-Blackwell, 1996)., and David Harvey, Social Justice and the City, Revised edition 2009 (London & Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1973) <https://pdf.wecabrio.com/social-justice-and-the-city-harvey.pdf> [accessed 4 August 2021].
Semiotics in this proposal is defined as the formal study of signs in the broadest sense; not only signs that are artificial, linguistic or symbolic, but also signs that are semblances and are causal in reactions. Charles Sanders Peirce held that ‘all this universe is perfused with signs, if it is not composed exclusively of signs’, along with their representational and inferential relations, from the collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, 5.448 footnote, from The Basis of Pragmaticism in 1906. Semiotic & Significs: The Correspondence Between Charles S. Peirce & Victoria Lady Welby, ed. by Charles S. Hardwick and James Cook, 1st Edition (USA: Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977) <http://www.iupui.edu/~peirce/writings/v2/w2/w2_31/v2_31.htm>.
The research sets out a hypothesis, which is detailed in the report.
For the definitions of intra-, inter-, trans- and multi-disciplinary, refer to Alexander Refsum Jensnius, ‘Disciplinarities: Intra, Cross, Multi, Inter, Trans’, 2012 <https://www.arj.no/2012/03/12/disciplinarities-2/> [accessed 6 August 2021].