Abitacolo XLV
Speculative Interaction Design
MSc thesis — Tangible Trust. Sole author, Milan, 2026.
Ownership was never the feeling itself — only the technology that produced it. When ownership expires, belonging becomes a design material.
(The Non-Place)
By 2045, most journeys happen in vehicles nobody owns, and nobody drives. Two things dissolve at once: a territory of one's own, and a wheel that answers the hand. The project began as a question about autonomous cars and became a question about non-place spaces we pass through that belong to no one, with a shared pod as the purest case. That reframing turned an automotive brief into an interaction one.
(The Evidence)
Three strands, one code set. A nine-case comparables study placing hotels, long-haul cabins and rental fashion against bike share and hot-desking. A questionnaire of drivers and car-share users with a dedicated haptic layer. Four interviews conducted inside people's own cars. They converge on five behaviours a pod must answer for: scent as identity, instant body-fit, a greeting at the threshold, felt confirmation, and the witnessed erasure of the previous rider.
(Abitacolo XLV)
A personal access object carries the rider's identity; customisable in form; Aïda, 26, chose a pendant. Worn, it greets and unlocks. Docked, it hands the cabin over: the seat pre-fits, her scent blooms, and an armrest wakes under her hand with a real, clickable answer. Surfaces stay inert until approached, shy tech. At her stop the cabin purges to neutral in view of the next rider, and her belonging leaves with her.
(What Was Built)
Build the channels the argument depends on; stage the rest honestly. A one-to-one frame in timber and stretch fabric, doubling as a form study and a projection surface, runs presence, access, light, scent, and touch for real millimetre-wave sensing, with capacitive pads hidden under the veneer and a linear actuator giving one crisp tick per registered touch. A separate bench prototype carries the eight seconds the thesis rests on: dock, bloom, scent, and a memory that survives power-off.
