Yichen Su
- Vehicle Designer
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Intelligent Mobility Design Centre (IMDC)
Yichen is a transportation designer and researcher who is interested in and has project experiences with a variety of vehicles.
My role here in IMDC is mainly visualizing of the mobility visions and designing the vehicles in those visions.
Before joining IMDC, I did some internships at car OEMs, a bike company, a design consultancy and smaller studios. Through the design projects vary from delivery robots, bicycles to massive agricultural machineries, I gained more understanding to those non-car vehicles.
Also, being a keen cyclist in London and Shanghai gave me an “outside of vehicle view” in the traffic. Hope it gets handy at some point.
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Research Interests
The opportunities of working on very different vehicles gave me a chance to look at the wider-defined “vehicles”, especially how their different role in the society and people’s life forged their design. I believe designing AVs will be like that as well.
Autonomous mobility has been a topic of interest for me for a long time, almost since I started studying transportation design. Looking into the task of “designing an autonomous vehicle”, there is a technical level of re-thinking the century-old architecture of cars, but there is also a humanity/social level of it: to enhance a new human-machine communication, to create a new aesthetics that better suits AV’s and to encourage trust.
Current and recent projects
FMP: Safety via Intelligence, 2022
This is my MA Intelligent Mobility thesis.
This project discusses how to boost users’ trust and improve their experience with a less crash-proof autonomous vehicle, in a near-future crash-free full autonomous scenario, and explore the aesthetics of the new active safety vehicle.