Exalted With Time | Interior Design for Autonomous Vehicle
2019.11
Keywords: In-car Interaction Design, New material, Autonomous vehicle
Tools: Rhino, Alias, Keyshot, Photoshop
Design for Autonomous Vehicle
Autonomy brings efficiency. However, boredom would become a problem of the riding experience in the age of autonomous driving. Even today in a fleet sharing ride, people tend to staring at screens, rather than sharing feelings with others. Interpersonal stress and estrangement occurs when technology goes to viral. How might we redefine the activities in the car as a matter of upgrading user experience back to joy and ease? As a private-shared space, one car would be used as a social place, where friendship and memories are brewed into treasures exalted with time.
Wisdom from Winding Stream Party
The Winding stream party (Chinese: 流觴曲水) is an old Chinese custom dates back to 2000 years ago, in which the participants wait by a winding stream and compose poems before their cups full of rice wine float down to reach them. This Chinese custom was adopted by the Koreans and Japanese as a party game played by the nobility. Participants must compose a tanka poem beside a stream, within a time limit set by the passage of a lacquer cup of sake floating towards them on the water. When the cup reached the poet, they were expected to drink its contents, either as a celebration of the poem's completion or as a forfeit if they had not composed a suitable verse in time. This idea is adopted to this interior design to create a festive experience in mobility.
Maglev Cups
Maglev technology is introduced to the design of the cup and table. Through the principle of the same magnetic pole repulsion, the cups are transferred from the bar in the front of the car to the table in the rear as if it were floating in the water. At the same time, the magnetic force attracts the cup to the table to prevent it from falling over during the car's movement.
Why Bamboo?
Bamboo as a traditional low-cost building material in East Asia, it has several properties in sustainability.
Fast-growing: Bamboo is the fastest growing plant in the world. Some of the hollow stems on the bamboo floor can grow 40 cm per day, and the height can reach 35-40 meters when fully grown. The reason why bamboo grows fast is due to its hollow structure of culms and nodes, which is growing together both vertically and horizontally.
Versatile: As an excellent lightweight raw material, bamboo fiber is lightweight, high-strength, suitable for modular design which reduce excessive processes and components to improve design flexibility and material corrosion resistance.
Economically Sustainable: It not only has the characteristics of high hardness and strong wear resistance, but bamboo itself is a plant that can adapt to different climates and has a short growth cycle of 2-5 years to harvest but a 60 years lifespan of a highly renewable rate, which greatly saves energy input. In the case of the same area of building materials, the energy consumption of bamboo is 1/8 of the energy consumption of concrete, 1/3 of the energy consumption of wood, and 1/50 of the energy consumption of steel. Bamboo structure is not only energy-saving and low in cost, but also reliable in quality and durable in life.
Bamboo Wine-Exalted with Time
Bamboo wine, is naturally brewed in bamboo culms as the fermenting container. The original rice wine is injected into the bamboo culms half year before, so that the wine is naturally mixed in the non-polluting bamboo and bamboo film in culms to second-fermented. It requires no additives, fertilizers or pesticides. It can also converts formaldehyde and ethanol in traditional wines into acetic acid that is good for health.
Bamboo Patina-Exalted with People's Touch
Bamboo patina is a blend of aging – produced by rubbing, dusting, and natural waxing – along with oxidization of the bamboo, and sun exposure. Together, this natural process produces a bronze-like luster. Bamboo morphs from a greenish tone to soft shades of brown, gold, and grey. Patina is not a one-time thing, it takes a long time to baptize before the effect can occur. The other way around, the thicker the patina, the more profound the time and human trajectory it has experienced. The price of a piece of bamboo coated with patina will increase thousands of times, and its quality will be better.