Human mobility is the root of many of our most costly and debilitating societal problems - from urban sprawl to the rising cost of health care. Though the automotive industry acknowledges the need for sustainable mobility, that need remains unfilled in any meaningful way because transportation design remains steeped in a culture of styling and planned obsolescence.
Slow Design is a response to the decadent excesses of contemporary product design. With roots in the Slow Food and Arts and Crafts movements, it is a methodology that replaces sales with human well-being as its foundational premise. Applied to the problem of mobility, Slow Design could provide the catalyst that steers the ship of transportation onto a more sustainable course.
This paper documents the application of Slow Design to create of an automotive alternative for intracity transportation the Trimtab 3X3, a vehicle designed to provide convenient, healthful mobility and perhaps change the course of the transportation paradigm.
"Something hit me very hard once, thinking about what one little man could do. Think of the Queen Mary; the whole ship goes by and then comes the rudder. And there''s a tiny thing at the edge of the rudder called a trimtab.
It's a miniature rudder. Just moving the little trim tab builds a low pressure that pulls the rudder around. Takes almost no effort at all. So I said that the little individual can be a trimtab. Society thinks it's going right by you, that it's left you altogether. But if you're doing dynamic things mentally, the fact is that you can just put your foot out like that and the whole big ship of state is going to go.
So I said, call me Trimtab." - R. Buckminster Fuller