A seat that meets you at eye level
NUN
Summary
When riding with strangers becomes the default in autonomous shared mobility, the cabin stops imposing a state on people and lets each of them choose one.
- 3 × 3
- 20+
- 0W
Problem
At level 4 and above the role of "driver" disappears, and in shared mobility riding with strangers is the default rather than the exception. Three tensions are then imposed on the rider.
- Relational tension — eye levels that don't match.
- Spatial tension — no choice of what to look at.
- Bodily tension — a body that doesn't fit the space.
Who you ride with, your body and your reason for travelling are all decided again on every trip.
Research
- Desk research from papers — height difference creating hierarchy; adaptive seating raising flexibility while lowering privacy; prospect–refuge theory.
- Structural research — six origami patterns (Kresling, Yoshimura, Miura tube, bellows, waterbomb, Resch) compared on vertical travel, load and manufacturability.
Key decisions
Don't handle the feeling — handle the three quantities that make it
The three axes passed one test each: grounded in research, continuously adjustable, and independent of one another.
Eye level · outward view · enclosure, across three states (intended tension, prospect, refuge).
Propose and be accepted, never change by itself
A system that changes things on its own is another imposition. Accepting and declining is what personalisation can be built from.
With several people aboard, a shared axis follows whoever wants more privacy.
Separate what moves from what carries the load
A seat has to change height and hold a body. Moving means giving; holding means stiffening.
Four concepts (POP-LOCK, TENSION BLOOM, BREATH POD, TENSEGRITY WEAVE) compared on eight criteria; a frame-plus-tension-membrane hybrid won.
Weight instead of motors
In public, shared settings, power, maintenance and failure are what kill a mechanism.
Zero motors, zero watts — a one-degree-of-freedom rigid folding linkage with a bistable snap. At extreme weight ratios it cannot level fully, and that limit is recorded.
Level the eyes with nothing but sitting down — NUN
A bench that gives everyone the same height looks fair, but with different bodies the eye lines don't meet.
One side sinks and the other rises under the sitter's weight alone, with no controls. A self-locking origami structure unfolding from 40mm to 700mm, tested in folded paper, then carried from a park bench to an autonomous PBV interior.
Design
- Three layers of interface — choose a state in the app before boarding, adjust with three sliders and three presets in the cabin, and later let sensors and the city's context propose.
- Six scenarios — mismatched eye levels, a body that doesn't fit, a conversation that matters, a picnic in the city, a space of one's own, shelter on a rainy day.
Prototype
- Over twenty physics simulators in four strands — weight-driven seesaw, pure origami, pneumatic, mechanism studies.
- Design → verify → make — rigid panel chain simulation (PBD), a modified GPU origami simulator, a Python fold-pattern generator, SVG crease-pattern export.
- New ideas were stacked as new files rather than overwriting the old ones.
Reflection
- A good answer came from re-reading a constraint, not adding a feature. Taking the motor out made the seat's problem look different.
- Pretending to have solved something unsolved throws off everything designed after it.
- Still open — repeated-use durability, noise and vibration, temperature, crash safety, user testing, cost and regulation.