Future Urban Mobilities: A Human Approach

Insights workshop

Insights workshop was led by the Ethnographic research team and was designed to put people at the centre of the discussions between the different stakeholders. In the first stage participants were presented with talks about the ethnographic work and viewed video clips of specific examples of two people’s commutes. These were presented from the perspective of daily routines, in order to emphasise that these experiences are embedded in everyday life. This was shown as a ‘commute journey map’. Workshop participants then worked in mixed stakeholder groups to identify points of interest (POI) relating to mobility solutions in the routine maps. Through this process, the different perspectives of the different stakeholders came to the surface and also created the starting point for the next stage, which focused on creating possible innovations for commuting. Participants completed tables in which they wrote the perspectives of the different stakeholders alongside each other, while also uniting them in relation to their commercial and societal values, interest for other stakeholders, and feasibility.

Subsequently, the main exercise of the workshop was to learn how to create mobility solutions together, under the following two conditions: a) all stakeholders were needed to develop the solution, and b) the solutions should address actual real-life situations based in ethnographic insights and materials.

Map of different stakeholder perspectives in creating a joint mobility technology. Photograph by Thomas Lindgren

 

The groups collaborated to develop future mobilities scenarios. Video still by Kaspar Raats.

The video clips reveal the outcomes of the work of each group’s collaborative work. While each example represents a possible future mobility solution, the point of the exercise was not to create finished solutions, but to develop a methodology through which stakeholders with different perspectives and ambitions could work together towards solutions.

 

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The Mobilities Hub proposed by this group is a human-centred approach to future mobilities that seeks to ensure that new mobilities facilities offer not only services but also meaning for their users and around which new Mobilities Communities would grow.
 

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The First Mile Service,this is specific service which involves the use of AD cars in suburban areas. They can be accessed on demand using an app, and connect users and their homes to the bus stop. This group focused on this particular aspect of the service and its connectedness to the local area.
 

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The Mobility Platform that this group proposedis a service, led by the municipality which provides 1) a platform for inhabitants and 2) a platform for service providers. The group took a human centred approach to the platform in using an ethnographically inspired example to explain what it would be like for a person to use this platform. 
 

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The Transition Hub,which features in this group’s work,is developed through two ethnographic examples in order to create a human focused approach to making MaaS work. The group developed two different user journeys for quite different types of user. Each of the examples suggests how we might be able to harness the creativity of human improvisation to shape ways of using MaaS applications.