Nomadic pathways

Project Information

In my project, I delve into the concept of mobility and its relationship with the environment. This journey began with my passion for travelling and experiencing diverse cultures, where I witnessed firsthand the challenges people face in accessing essential services due to inadequate infrastructure in regions like India. Despite economic growth leading to infrastructure expansion, it often comes at the cost of ecosystem loss and community disruption. Recognizing these challenges, I decided to investigate the traditional link between mobility and infrastructure.

This interdependence has spanned centuries, from Roman roads to today’s massive terminals. This relationship has caused a lot of problems through the years. Today 2 percent of the world's land is dedicated to transportation infrastructure. Building this causes a lot of environmental destruction and habitat loss, natural ecosystems are disturbed and cause a lot of urban heat, and all sorts of pollution. The construction process also causes a lot of stress on regional settlements, it leads to dust and noise pollution and sometimes entire communities have to be displaced to make space for it, resulting in people losing their homes. Constructing adequate transportation infrastructure is very expensive, which makes this important resource out of reach of millions of communities, leading them to be left behind by developed countries. This causes a lot of social disparities making essential resources out of the reach of many.

We are moving into a new era of mobility with the widespread implementation of electric and autonomous vehicles. This will trigger more destructive expansion from digging up the earth to laying down miles of cables and building bigger Power stations. However, this transition could also change how we design our vehicle ecosystems. Knowing this we only focus on the vehicles, never looking at the bigger picture, often overlooking the background damages. We have always built before we move. For this reason, I decided to attempt to design vehicles that operate independently of infrastructure.

Result

My collaboration partner in this project is Volvo AB. Their vast portfolio of brands, including everything except cars – provoked a thought – if different brands could work together, to create vehicles that support each other to overcome this question.

For the final concept, I envisioned an ecosystem of vehicles, helping out each other to overcome the challenges of infrastructure. The Jordrath (the earth chariot) is a smart multi-terrain cargo trailer, capable of becoming a logistics hub in itself, it uses a modular cargo pod system to transport goods. These cargo pods are owned by users giving them a cheap and easy way to join the logistics services. The Solrath (the sun chariot) is a hybrid electric vertical take-off vehicle for transporting and harvesting energy, capable of becoming a charging and logistic space for smart trailers. It is essentially a free space with onboard energy, that is also capable of participating in community activities hence giving back to the people, and becoming a welcome addition to their region.

The region in focus is on the growing world, particularly India, a region close to my heart. Within this context, we’re honing in on the cottage industry sector, which forms the backbone of the Indian economy, emphasizing small-scale production, craftsmanship, and tradition preservation. To address the logistics needs of producers, makers, and distributors within this industry. The project intends to develop a flexible and decentralized transportation system that ensures easy mobility without disrupting nature, enhances resilience against natural disasters, integrates efficient energy management systems, and is independent of infrastructure.

This ecosystem allows people to use efficient logistics networks while not sacrificing their natural surroundings. And making logistics facilities democratically accessible for everyone. Moreover, in the event of natural disasters or disruptions caused by climate change, transportation infrastructure is one of the first things that is affected, these vehicles could be deployed to these regions to give mobility and energy support.

Message

This project seeks to inspire future transportation design strategies by looking beyond just the vehicle. Its goal is to advocate for vehicles with minimal operational footprint and the ability to reach every community worldwide. It envisions vehicles that aren’t reliant on regional industrialization yet still offer mobility options. Moving transportation design from human-centric to society and environment-centric. A more than human Philosophy.