Self-Driving Society

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A design exploration on the future of autonomous mobility and its impact on society

How will autonomous mobility impact the society of the future? What are the opportunities, the challenges and the new innovation scenarios prompted by this new technological transformation? These are some of the questions that led Giulio Ceppi and the Giannino Bassetti Foundation to promote the research topic of the Self-Driving Society.

While I was serving as a Senior Consultant for Design & Academy, I conceptualized and led for the Foundation this extensive research. The work started with the students of the Design School of Politecnico di Milano in 2017, and later culminated with the publication of the white paper Responsibility Driven Design for the Future Self-Driving Society and the creation of a dedicated website and a social media campaign to disseminate it.

This research project was instrumental for Fondazione Giannino Bassetti to establish itself as an important opinion leader in Milan and in Italy on the topic of the future of mobility. Many activities and achievements were prompted by this work: the involvement of the Foundation in the Tavolo su Smart Mobility e Intelligenza Artificiale of the Lombardy Region and the co-creation with MEET | Fondazione Cariplo of the series of conferences Meet the Media Guru | Around Mobility, just to name two.

Images by Tommaso Correale Santacroce – full albums on Flickr

In 2017 I was asked to create and run a workshop inside Self Driving Society @2030, the Final Synthesis Studio at the Master in Integrated Product Design of Politecnico di Milano, coordinated by prof. Giulio Ceppi.

We approached the workshop with the goal of having students work on Responsible Innovation (which is the mission of Fondazione Bassetti) and its application to the scenario of the Self-Driving Society. We created a format and several tools specifically thought to help students combine responsibility topics in the field of driverless technologies with design requirements.

The encouraging results of the workshop, convinced us of the richness of this approach that we called Responsibility-Driven Design and prompted us to share these tools with any professional, organization or university interested in using them.

Download the Responsibility Matrix and the Collingridge Positioning and use them freely under Creative Commons license.

An intense week of design, frontal lectures, brainstormings and project reviews, eventually produced 44 concepts and visions for the responsible development of the future society living in a world permeated by driverless technologies.

Combining conventional design disciplines and policymaking concerns, students succeeded in developing projects which tackled complex issues on the social impact of this technological innovation.

The white paper. Responsibility Driven Design for the Future Self-Driving Society

The compelling results of the workshop confirmed to us the value of this responsibility-driven design approach and led us to write and publish a white paper with the aim of engaging all the stakeholders involved in this imminent technological transition.

Mobility automation, in fact, will not only have an impact on the transportation industry itself, it will lead to the transformation of the socio-cultural fabric of countries all over the world: habits and behaviors will change, new products and services will improve people’s lifestyles, cities will be reshaped and, above all, society will transform itself in its complexity. The focus shifts from the self-driving car to the self-driving society, indeed.

Building upon the experience gained in the university, this work proposes the discipline of design and its methodologies as key tools to responsibly define and build a future society immersed in automated mobility systems.

Download the white paper here →

Self-Driving Society website and digital dissemination

To strengthen the dissemination of the research and promote the white paper, we designed and created the Self-Driving Society website (where it is possible to download the paper and the design tools), the flyers with QR codes, the social media cards along with the social media campaign.