A Complete Rethink

Did your team actually design a concept car?

We’ve designed two concept cars in parallel. One was based on the Smart Cities group at the MIT Media Lab called the CityCar—a foldable, lightweight electric automobile. And then there’s the PUMA that my GM colleagues developed with Segway, which sort of balances on two wheels.

When you say a “folding mechanism,” does the car actually compress?

It does. For the CityCar, we put everything in the wheels. There’s no engine, no traditional drivetrain. We have an independent drive motor, steering motor, and digital suspension in each wheel. The wheels are independent, so the car can spin on its own axis. Since there’s no big engine in front, this allows for front entry, so you can push the nose into the curb, fold it up, and do this in less space than the width of a stand-up parking bay. We get very high parking density without having to massively redo our streets.

How does this redefine the urban street?

It’s important to recognize that unlike putting in a new subway, we thought of this as a strategy for incremental transformation. You can overlay into the existing infrastructure.

The way New York City is adding bike paths?

Yes. You also improve the quality of streets enormously. These vehicles are silent, so you get rid of traffic noise, which has huge architectural implications, because windows no longer have to be defensive barriers against traffic noise. We get rid of local tailpipe pollution. There are all kinds of urban and street-design opportunities in taking the released space and putting it to other uses, like trees, seats, cafés. Streets are now more supportive of these things, so they’re much more pleasant places.

Let’s talk about Detroit. Do you see any hope coming out of there in terms of reinventing the car?

My GM collaborators are very smart and imaginative and came out of the research-and-development side of the company, which has always been good. We have a tremendously productive working relationship. However, I don’t have a lot of hope for the traditional automobile companies, because they’re committed to their existing business models. There’s tremendous inertia, huge fixed investments in old ways of doing things. That’s going to make it difficult for them to be successful players. I think we’re going to see new players.

How do we get away from this dinosaur thinking that impedes progress?

My designer’s bias comes in here. It’s important to get the technology and the policy right, but in the end, the way you break a logjam is by engaging people’s imagination, people’s desire, by creating things that they never thought of before. This is something that Apple has led the way in. So a crucial part of this will be to create sexy prototypes and convincing small-scale pilot projects in sympathetic environments.

I think this automobile project represents a real shift in approach. It’s about systems thinking, about how everything is related to everything else. How do you get designers—whether they’re car designers or architects or urban planners—to take this bigger-picture, more holistic approach?

One of the huge problems with design has been the way that the lines get broken up into these traditionally defined disciplines. You’re an architect or a graphic designer or a silicon-chip designer or an interaction designer, blah blah, blah. The big, important design issues just don’t fall in these categories anymore.

They sprawl in messy ways across them. We have architects, urban designers, economists, mechanical engineers, electrical geeks, and we put them together into an intense multidisciplinary design environment. And we do it in a way that’s different from the way that you’d organize a multidisciplinary team on an architectural project, where everyone has their role. We say, “Yes, you have expertise that you bring to the table, but it’s everyone’s responsibility to contribute to everything and educate the rest of the group as necessary on the issues that you know most about.” We knew nothing about battery technology when we started, but one of the great adventures of MIT is you can walk down the hall and find the world’s leading expert. The strategy is to go out, find what you need to know, and bring it back to the design project.

But isn’t MIT an exception here? It’s generally perceived as the epicenter of forward thinking. How do you get the rest of the country to adopt this model?

There are a lot of good universities. The model can be generalized, but design schools don’t want to do it. They drive me crazy: “We’re a unique culture.” That’s why I have a joint appointment in architecture and the Media Lab and a lot of activity in planning. But I do my work in the Media Lab because I couldn’t do it in the architecture department.

Why?

Because the identity of the architect is very important. Personally, I don’t care whether we call it architecture or if they call me an architect. I care about doing progressive, socially effective work. Wherever it takes me, I’ll go.

But we need to change the way we think about professional education. The standard way of thinking is: you go to design school for however many years, build a stock of intellectual capital, and then live off that. They give you a provisional education for the rest of your career. And it just doesn’t work anymore. The fundamental professional skill of a designer these days is strategically investing learning time. You must be able to say, “OK, there is an immensity of stuff out there to learn, but this is what’s important to instantly learn for this project.” You can never say, “Well, I’m an architect, so I don’t do battery technology.” You just can’t. These are the directions design schools and universities have to go in. The exciting thing is, engineering and business schools are starting to learn how important design is, how the most effective way of adding economic value is to do clever design, but they don’t have a clue yet how to do it.