Integrated Multi-Disciplinary Approaches in Higher Education to Conceive Future Mobility and Transport Design Practice in Extreme Scenarios

The complexity of contemporary society and mobility imposes the rethinking or adaptation of well-established ways of designing products and services which are no longer effective in tackling systemic and sustainability problems. Developing experiential learning in this regard is required to adopt new teaching methods and strategies in higher education to enable students’ collaboration and co-creation whilst supporting their design thinking and skills formation.

The proposed paper intends to critically reflect on collaborative, research based and industry-informed integrated approaches to education through two distinct, but complementary project case studies, developed respectively at Northumbria University and the Politecnico di Milano. An analysis is provided to illustrate how students approach projects through design and innovation methods alongside their developmental skills used to deal with complexity and propose well thought-out solutions.

The two case studies explore future mobility scenarios where autonomous vehicles (AVs) are enabled by artificial intelligence (AI) to either respond to extreme situations (the first case study) or ensure inclusion and accessibility for impaired users (the second case study).

Key design and educational considerations are derived from an evaluation of how technologies and development methodologies may enable graduates to proactively face the challenges of the fast evolving transportation design sector'