ABSTRACT
The following case study relates an innovative transportation design that I was able to study up-close for a period of two years. This design project, under development at a large Midwestern land-grant university from 2007 until 2011, I will call the Electric Personal Transportation Vehicle project, or EPTV. The project involved the design and manufacture of an all-electric, self-guided (autonomous) transportation system centered on the design and production of a small vehicle known as a “pod car.” Ultimately, dozens of these pod cars were to be built and eventually connected to an information and guidance network. The network was never finished, but we can now examine the design of the vehicle to understand why it was not persuasive – as a design project, as a site for new interfaces, as a new logistic, and as a new techne of navigation. Before I focus on this analysis, however, I explain the context of the design project and then consider the formation of EPTV through the lens of actor-network theory, employing a similar framework from Bruno Latour’s post-mortem analysis of Aramis in order to do so.
