We often place our bodies in unnatural and dangerous situations without really being aware of it. Whether it’s 7,000 metres up in an aeroplane, on a train passing through an underwater tunnel or – even more frequently – in a car on the motorway. Each of these vehicles is a capsule that filters out the dangers and makes us feel totally comfortable. Driving around in a car with luxurious upholstery, constant temperature and a fabulous sound system, you tend to forget that you and the other cars around you are all hurtling along the highway. Incredibly dangerous, if you think about it! We trustingly place small kids in capsules of their own too, in the shape of the child car seat. As we travel, we are cut off from the world around us and often move so fast that we cannot even see who is driving next to us. Back in 1968, the anonymity of the car prompted the designer Luud Schimmelpenninck to design a system of electric carts in Amsterdam. The brochure for the ‘Witkar’ (‘White Car’ or ‘Cart’) was headlined: ‘Witkar gives the pedestrian wheels’. Schimmelpenninck saw the Witkar’s driver as a fellow pedestrian rather than a motorist. The Witkar was a kind of ‘anti-capsule’, in which you were still in touch with your surroundings. Schimmelpenninck was ahead of his time in terms of both his special electric charging stations and the fact that the Witkar was intended for sharing.