City car: digitalisation and design
Walter de Silva, acclaimed car design master recently appointed President of the Transportation Design Department and of the new Mobility Design Lab at SPD, will give a Lectio Magistralis on the theme City Car: digitalization and design. De Silva will start off with the consideration that today’s reality is inextricably made of both analogic and digital as, he reckons, the analogic world is here to stay for a long time, despite the manyfold spurs to dematerialisation.
According to de Silva, in the coming years mobility will follow three different strands: flexible driving, which will allow medium or long-haul transfer from A to B in a semi-autonomous mode; amateur manual driving to have fun behind the wheel, mainly limited to the racing track; finally, the automatic or rather the semi-automatic mode in the urban environment where mobility is merely a necessity. And here de Silva will delve deeper into his vision of the next urban mobility, by explaining how autonomous and semi-autonomous will develop with reference to product and service interactions and controversial topics such as safety and protection, simplification by design, materials and technologies, the revolution in the interior layout and, last but not least, personalisation and empathy with the humans as the antidote to standardization.