Floating blimp bumper buses may arrive in 2028

Smart DOTS is a radical strategy for rethinking the crossroad by injecting a system of intelligent environmental elements ― smart dots ― that can spread out from the core to the periphery, reorganizing the streetscape, Terraform ONE said in a project paper.

The design scheme is a critique of the hard boundaries that the automobile inflicts to the function of the streetscape, where people are forced to move around cumbersome barriers and often dangerous metal cars.

The transport vehicles look like jelly fish that are elevated in mid-air and travelling at around 25 kilometers per hours with the seats floating as well using magnetic forces.

The future street is a soft, gradient field: an urban landscape of distributed functions, with no hard borders between different street occupancies.

Soft MOBS invokes a new technological and material arrangement for adapting cars to cities in pliable organized movements ― soft mobs― while it also suggests the use of softer vehicles where users can be in direct contact with the street.

While architects and urban designers mostly take cars as given, and are content to design streets and public spaces around car movement.

The design is organized in three phases 2008, 2020 and 2028 respectively. In Phase 2008, minor design interventions were suggested as immediate safety measurements against continual conflicts of pedestrians with automobiles.

Phase 2020, signals a transition period, where car lanes are narrowed, pedestrian zones are widened, bicycle bollards are introduced with new car technology and gentle congestion.

Already in Phase 2020, the placement of environmental smart dots, or green modules that filter rainfall, greywater, and at the same time, slow down traffic separating smoothly walking zones, bicycles and transportation zones will be suggested.

Phase 2028 is the future embodied in gradient green zones, and living self-sufficient machines that provide their own energy, generating electricity through air movement.

In the future, giant benevolent air-cleansing blimps dangle tentacles to collide spongy seats in a playful catch-and-release plan for people moving about town. All life is enveloped in a sentient ecology of street, mobile systems, and people.