Short Programs

Innovations in Personal Urban Mobility [PI.966s]

Date: June 18-21, 2012 | Tuition: $3,200 | Continuing Education Units (CEUs): 2.4

*This course has limited enrollment. Apply early to guarantee your spot.
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Course Summary  |  Learning Objectives  |  Who Should Attend  |  Program Outline  |  Schedule  | 
Participants' Comments  |  About the Lecturers  |  Location  |  Links & Resources  |  Updates

Course Summary

This workshop-style course will focus on the development and deployment of innovations for achieving sustainable personal mobility in cities. We will examine the latest “in-the-box” innovations in technology, designs, strategies, and policies employed by cities to increase energy efficiency, reduce carbon emissions, and improve overall access and mobility for increasingly dense and crowded urban environments. We will also explore “out-of-the-box” innovations that go beyond incremental improvements and utilize system-level integration, holistic thinking, ecosystem solutions, and cutting edge technology.

The course will introduce a broad survey of the following key areas of sustainable urban mobility:

1. Vehicles – A morphology of vehicle types (buses, cars, trucks, motorcycles, bicycles, segways) and technologies (electric, hybrids, fuel cells, biofuels, compressed natural gas, etc.) will be presented as well as the latest vehicle innovations (MIT Media Lab’s CityCar concept, GM’s EN-V, Autonomous Driving).
2. Urban infrastructure – Electric charging infrastructure, rapid charging stations, Vehicle-to-Grid (V2G), Smart Grids, novel energy storage, mass transit systems (i.e. Bus Rapid Transit), alternative vehicle lanes, and bike lanes.
3. Use and Economic Models – Private car ownership, shared-use systems (i.e. ZipCar, bike sharing programs), fleet operations, public transit, traditional rentals, and Mobility-on-Demand (MoD) Systems..
4. Urban Implementation – Urban design of streetscape, parking, buildings, creation of new urban policy (i.e. congestion pricing, dynamic road pricing), use of intelligent fleet management systems, integration into public transit systems, pilot testing, and deployment.

The course will be divided into three learning methods 1) lectures by course faculty and guests from academia and industry, 2) participatory group design work in “charrette” sessions (a type of brainstorming), and 3) critique by faculty and invited experts. Using the MIT campus as a potential site for deployment, course participants will work on a series of short in-class assignments that focus on solving practical mobility problems. The goal of the workshop is for participants to engage in critical thinking about the technological, social, cultural, and economic challenges for achieving smart sustainable cities in order to return to their community, corporation, or institution to implement positive change.

The course textbook will be Reinventing the Automobile: Personal Urban Mobility for the 21st Century, MIT Press, written by (the late) MIT Professor William J. Mitchell with two automotive experts from General Motors, Christopher Borroni-Bird and Lawrence Burns.

Learning Objectives

1. Understand the current environmental, energy, and mobility issues facing cities.
2. Build a knowledge base of the latest technologies and strategies being developed and deployed in cities and understand the benefit and cost tradeoffs for these solutions.
3. Develop new concepts and designs by participating in "charrette" sessions (a type of brainstorming in small groups) that focus on a limited set of core issues connected to a real-world implementation.
4. Evaluate the technological, design, economic, and policy implications from the charrette and discussions.

5. Develop a holistic and system-level perspective on sustainable urban mobility that takes an integrative approach towards complex problems.

Who Should Attend

No specialized knowledge is required; however, this course will be particularly useful for architects, urban and transportation planners, systems integrators, executives, automotive designers/engineers, public policy makers, product designers, and project leaders.

Program Outline

Day 1

• Course Introduction and Overview
• Energy, Environment, and Mobility Challenges in Cities
• Alternative Vehicles (HEV, EVs, Fuel Cells, Biodiesel, etc.)
• Vehicle Sharing Programs*
• Electric Charging Infrastructure and Smart Grids
• Day 1 overview
• Group dinner (after class)

Day 2

• Transportation Logistics and Fleet Management Systems
• What’s Happening Now Inside the Automobile Industry*
• Urban Design Implications
• Charrette No.1
• Day 2 overview

Day 3

• Autonomous Driving Technologies*
• Public Policy
• Economic Models
• Charrette No. 2
• Day 3 overview

Day 4

• Charrette No. 3
• Final Review and Critique*
• Course overview and wrap-up

*Invited academic or industry experts

Course schedule and registration times

Class runs 8:30 am - 5:00 pm each day except on Thursday when it ends at 3:00 pm.

Registration is on Monday morning from 7:45 - 8:15 am.

Special events include a dinner for course participants and faculty on Monday night. Evening activities are included in tuition.

Please note that laptops are required for this course.

Participants' Comments

About the Lecturers

Kent Larson
Kent Larson directs the Changing Places research group at the MIT Media Lab. He is also director of the MIT House_n Research Consortium and the MIT Living Labs initiative in the School of Architecture and Planning. Current research is focused on four related areas:

• Urban Mobility: integrated approaches to urban mobility that include shared-use, dynamically priced mobility systems as well as autonomous vehicle control for driverless parking and charging. The group is also developing strategies for creating mass-customized vehicles that take advantage of wheel robots, skateboard chassis, and drive-by-wire technology. The MIT Media Lab CityCar is one instance of this approach.
• CityHome: mass-customized, zero-energy urban housing that responds to the unique needs and values of individuals. Researchers are developing strategies to disentangle places of living into four independently configured layers: high-performance chassis; integrated, user-designed infill; responsive façade modules; and wireless technology. Several prototypes have been created with these concepts, including a zero-energy home at Unity College, Maine for the school's president and a multi-family apartment complex with customizable units in Cambridge, MA.
• Ubiquitous Technologies: wireless sensing, algorithms, and interfaces to understand and respond to human activity as well as environmental and market conditions. Projects range from fine-grain activity recognition using tiny wireless sensors, a persuasive thermostat using GPS location of occupants, and a context-aware tunable LED lighting for office environments.
• Living Lab Experiments: deploying and testing design and technology solutions in actual living environments. Studies have been conducted at the scale of the person, home, office, and city.

Larson practiced architecture for 15 years in New York City. He has won numerous design awards, with work published in Architectural Record, Progressive Architecture, Global Architecture, the New York Times, A+U, Architectural Digest, Metropolis, and Time Magazine as a "Best Design of the Year" project. His book, Louis I. Kahn: Unbuilt Masterworks was selected as one of the Ten Best Books in Architecture, 2000 by the New York Times Review of Books.

Ryan Chin
Ryan Chin is a Research Specialist and Ph.D. Candidate at the MIT Media Laboratory in the Changing Places research group. His research in Urban Mobility Systems addresses the energy and mobility problems of 21st century cities, such as energy efficiency, congestion, urban land-use, and carbon emissions leading to global warming. He has led and managed the conceptual and design development of a series of Lightweight Electric Vehicles (LEVs) within the Changing Places group, including the CityCar, RoboScooter, and GreenWheel Smart Bicycle. Each LEV has been built upon “Robot Wheel” technology – in-wheel electric drive motors with embedded steering, electronically actuated braking, and suspension that can be controlled independently through By-Wire control systems. These projects were developed in collaboration with MIT Media Lab sponsors General Motors (GM), Sanyang Motors (SYM), and Schneider Electric.

Currently, he is building the CityCar – a foldable, sharable, modular, electric two-passenger vehicle that utilizes four Robot Wheels – in collaboration with Denokinn, a Spanish-based economic incubator that has created a consortium of automotive suppliers to industrialize the CityCar within 3 years. In 2007, Smart Cities unveiled the RoboScooter – a folding electric motor scooter – at the Milan Motorcycle and Bicycle show. The RoboScooter also utilizes modular Robot Wheels that enable the Scooter to fold and minimizes the total parts to one tenth of a traditional motor scooter. The third vehicle based on in-wheel motor technology is the GreenWheel – an electrically assisted bicycle that utilizes an integrated in-wheel motor and battery hub. The GreenWheel provides an electrical assist so that users can easily overcome hills and travel longer distances (20 miles on a 25 minute rapid charge), thus enabling greater accessibly to bicycling for all demographics.

Chin has also led in the development of “Mobility-on-Demand” (MoD) Systems – a network of one-way shared-use LEVs enabled by electric rapid charging infrastructure and smart fleet management systems. Users of MoD simply walk to the closest charging station, swipe a credit card, pick-up a CityCar, RoboScooter, or GreenWheel, and then drop-off at another charging station. Chin’s research contribution on Sustainable Urban Mobility in the Smart Cities group (prior to joining Changing Places) led to the group’s first major publication, Reinventing the Automobile: Personal Urban Mobility for the 21st Century, by William J. Mitchell, Christopher Borroni-Bird, and Lawrence Burns, (MIT Press, January 2010). Professor William J. Mitchell was the director of the Smart Cities group from its founding in 2003 until his passing in 2010.

In 2007, Chin co-founded the MIT Smart Customization group (SCG) with Professors William J. Mitchell, Marvin Minsky, and Frank T. Piller with the task of improving the ability of companies to efficiently customize products and services across a diverse set of industries and customer groups. Chin’s research in SCG currently focuses on the environmental, energy, and material benefits of smart customization in products.

Chin has been a keynote speaker and panelist at conferences like MIT’s Emerging Technologies Conference (EmTech), SIGGRAPH, TEDx- , Convergence, China Planning Network (CPN), MIT World, and Gridweek. Chin earned a Master of Science in Media Arts and Sciences (2004) and a Master of Architecture (2000) from MIT and Bachelor’s degrees in Civil Engineering and Architecture from the Catholic University of America (1997).

Websites:      

• http://cp.media.mit.edu (Changing Places)
• http://cities.media.mit.edu (Smart Cities)
• http://scg.mit.edu (Smart Customization)
  

Location

This course takes place on the MIT campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts. We can also offer this course for groups of employees at your location. Please contact the Short Programs office for further details.

Links & Resources

Video/Audio:

• MIT Media Lab’s CityCar concept video - Download for Mac | Windows
• TEDxBoston: Ryan Chin talks about  Smart Cities: Sustainable Urban Mobility-on-Demand

News/Articles:

• The commercial version of CityCar launches in Brussels
• CityCar is soon to go into production as featured in the New York Times
• The Boston Globe celebrates MIT's 150th Anniversary with a list of 150 top innovations from the Institute--click here to read #114, the Next Zip Car and Ryan Chin
• MIT World: Ryan Chin talks about The CityCar
• The Futurist - Sustainable Urban Mobility in 2020, article by Ryan Chin
• eWeek video interview  - Kent Larson of MIT Has a Platform for Smarter Cities

Updates

There are no updates at this time.