Mémoire - Strate Collège

SUMMARY
Journeys and means of transport have become present everywhere in our
modern societies. Those modern means of transport, now affordable by
everyone, can be the first step of an adventure as much as its conclusion:
we can be going to an unknown place or going back to our daily life. Our
experience of this disp lacement influences a lot our behaviour during the
trip.
This dissertation is trying to explain our perceptions and interactions with
our environment during transports.
The first chapter is about he trip itself. Studying the different means of
transport evolutions is necessary to understand what brought us to modern
collective transport. Since medieval pedestrian displacement we have been
searching more and more efficiency. We have been looking for straight
speed, and created high-speed trains.
However this research of speed could perhaps stand up against some of the
trip purposes.
Modern passengers wish to be brought from one point to another one as fast
as possible. Indeed in our modern societies people are often stressed by time.
But this speed addictions put aside some of the trip psychological functions
such as discovering, learning, being lost and searching for its way.
Even if very effective, modern collective transport shows a few imbalances.
Means of transport have become simple and common tools, although they
were perceived during industrial revolution as nearly fantastic.
Passengers are looking for occupation, such as films, because of this
standardization. They forget the main purposes of the trip: movement and
discovery.
Our perceptions are exacerbated because we have left an ordinary and daily
environment. Unknown places keep us awake.
We can easily delude ourselves about our perceptions. Although time is
defined in a metric way in our modern societies, we feel it very differently,
for example if we are doing something or not.
Space is also interpreted by our cognition mechanisms; we do not control
the illusions we feel. We can resent displacement without moving of an
inch.
At last perceiving other people is also a changeable phenomenon. We set up
our judgement based on our mood and on the context.
In order to be effective, collective transports have become rigid. We undergo
fixed timetables and obligatory reservations. Nevertheless our perceptions
are very changeable.
Therefore studying human behaviour in society would be interesting. Indeed
our behaviour is linked to our perceptions.
We can see that more and more products such as headphones are conceived
in order to help people to isolate themselves in public areas. There’s a gap
between ourselves and public areas. Those two spaces have to interact, the
border has to be supple.
First of all the example of the Easter Island shows that a population needs
supple frontiers to survive. However despite the danger of strict borders for
a whole population, inside a group people want to isolate themselves from
the others and to have an identical space, such as avatars on the web.
Lastly comfort is directly linked to the possibility of moving our body. This
possibility in mainly provided by supple objects.
During a journey, transport is not only a displacement. It prepares ourselves
to meet unknown places and unknown people. Therefore displacement has
its own function.
Modern transport has been associated to a simple displacement tool, without
minding about the physical and psychological functions and consequences
of the displacement.
The righteous of those modern means of transport seems to compromise the
daydreaming discovery as much as the possibility of movement we need to
feel comfortable.
In the case of collective transports, such as planes or trains, studying products
taking into account our perceptions and our suppleness wishes seems to be
an interesting research direction.
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