IMDC Events

In September 2023, the IMDC hosted its first Lab Perspectives event, showcasing research projects and visions of the future of intelligent mobility through a combination of MA student work and key IMDC projects with industry partners across the centre's three labs – Automotive Transitions, Humanising Technology and People and Places.

The exhibition gave a vibrant perspective toward the techno-cultural concerns and opportunities across the future mobility landscape – highlighting the opportunity for enlightened brands and creative professionals.

The work across the centre adopts an innovative and visionary approach to the formation of new mobility propositions – developing ideologies and processes of design to engage with the key global issues of sustainability, autonomy, future digital experiences, AI, and alternative power. The work on display represented a series of OEM projects and individually generated briefs to a wide array of contemporary issues. These included exploration of the circular economy in future vehicle interiors, mobility for Gen A in future ‘15-minute cities’ and micromobility across Europe and Asia.

The symposium aims to bring together a wide range of speakers and an audience from various design, art, science and industry fields.

2022 Mobility Metamorphosis Symposium

The Mobility Metamorphosis symposium discussed the possibilities of a just transition in urban mobility, the cultural, technological, societal, ethical and aesthetic drivers of change which should inform the future designs for autonomous, shared, and sustainable mobility. It brought together researchers on architecture, city, mobility, technology and environment to address the need of cross-disciplinary collaboration to develop mobility solutions.

2020 Designing Intelligence into our Cities

The symposium explored what it means to design intelligence into our cities and how this differs from the smartness that has often been used to describe future cities?

2019 Transformation: arts <> cities <> mobility <> products <> services <> technology

The programme was divided into three sessions, each focused on one of the key topics: Transforming Cities and Society, Transforming Creativity and Practice and Transforming Mobility and Technology.

MORPH: Mobility | Ownership | Relationship | Personalisation | Hospitality

The MORPH Project report presents possible shared driverless vehicle models, and how human centred design processes can help identify the buy-in point for sharing by showing some adaptive car design concepts designed to be attractive to, and easily adopted by, individual consumers.

AHRC Design Fellows: challenges of the future mobility

TheAHRC Design Fellows: challenges of the future mobility report identifies where research communities are located; the challenges they face developing ideas into funded research and forming appropriate consortia; how they reinforce the impact of research in economic, societal and technological transformations; and what are the obstacles and benefits that design-led approaches drive in their research.

Emotional Tech - mobility rituals for real-world applications

The Emotional Tech project report reports explores the interactions and experiences of people and vehicles from the perspective of ‘emotions as affective artefacts' which tackles ‘emotion’ as a conduit to help with problem-solving, decision-making and sense-making.

Driverless Futures

GATEway (Greenwich Automated Transport Environment), jointly-funded by government and industry, was a £8m research project that aimed to understand and overcome the technical, legal and social challenges of implementing automated vehicles in an urban environment. The publication Driverless Futures. Design for acceptance and adoption in urban environments, an output of the project, is aimed at a wide range of people and stakeholders who might be interested in the future of driverless vehicles to show how design can be used to increase their acceptance and adoption in urban environments.

Our Future Towns

Our Future Towns is a project developed with people from across the country to reimagine how they can engage with the challenges of community place-making and transport planning. The Our future Towns report examines how to bring people together to talk about the things that matter in their town and to see how we can build on each other’s knowledge as well as the great ideas that are happening across the UK and around the world.