SOFT Blimp Bumper Bus: These blimps scoop passengers up “on the fly” in soft hanging chairs. Jumping off is a pinch, because they move less then 15 mph and float seats only inches above the ground. This constant densely packed motion increases traffic efficiency by almost 30 percent.
Smart DOTS is a radical strategy for rethinking the crossroad by “injecting” a system of intelligent environmental elements -“smart dots”- that can spread out from the core to the periphery, reorganizing the streetscape. The design scheme is a critique of the hard boundaries that the automobile inflicts to the function of the streetscape, where people are forced to move around cumbersome barriers and often dangerous metal cars. Our future street is a soft, gradient field: a “pixelated” urban landscape of distributed functions, with no hard borders between different street occupancies.
Soft MOBS invokes a new technological and material arrangement for adapting cars to cities in pliable organized movements -“soft mobs,”- while it also suggests the use of softer vehicles where users can be in direct contact with the street. While architects and urban designers mostly take cars as given, and are content to design streets and public spaces around car movement, here we challenge and reverse of this well-worn assumption.