Salamanca-R
2019
Academic project
Industrial Design
Strategic design
Who owns the city: the vehicle or the pedestrian?
Salamanca-R is a cry to the wind to give back to the pedestrian the space that has been taken away. An organic, fluid model, an urban design based on coexistence.
I follow rivers
To design the mobility of the future, we first had to understand how it had been throughout history, and the relationship between the vehicle and the human.
If we are traveling toward a more organic, restless, and unpredictable future, shouldn’t mobility be like that?
We found inspiration in rivers, and understood an ecosystem that flows through them.
If we understand streets as rivers, then buildings will be the rocks that define their course, and vehicles will be the fish that swim through them.
In order to meet the needs of the city and those who move through it, we designed three types of streets: rapids, rivers and tributaries, each with its own particularities.
But... what to start with?
Once the urban strategy guided by the concept of the rivers was defined, we had to design the fish that would swim through those streets.
We encountered 3 interrelated cornerstones that conditioned our path: the vehicle components, the interior space and the flow of users. And we had to choose which one to give more priority to. It was not very complicated.
The user. Always the user.
Typologies of users, interactions and combinations
We visually project the space occupied by each user, as if it were a shadow on the floor. Once this was done, we found 7 typologies of users: Workers, Adults in routine, Careless youths, Elders, Athletes, People with reduced mobility and Chaotic children.
After that, we combined the shadow cast by each of them and study all the possibilities. In the example below you can see that they can use the space in harmony up to a maximum of 3 “Workers” and 1 group of “Adults in routine”.
Organic city, organic cars
Salamanca-R seeks to give pedestrians back their natural space in the street. For this reason, its fundamental characteristic is its adaptability in the interior. An interior that adjusts automatically, allowing all combinations of user typologies to interact and enjoy the city.
A fluid and continuous exterior that accompanies the rhythm of the streets and its inhabitants.
