Mobility of the future with people as a starting point
During the closing event of the Danish-Swedish project Transverse Mobility presented Vaike Fors, Professor of Design Netnography at Halmstad University, their work with AHA II Project (AHA stands for A Human Approach).
“The industry talks about people as users of technology and looks at cost- and time-efficient mobility solutions,” she says. Cities look at people as community citizens who can help cities reach their goals. But who looks at solutions focused on people's everyday lives? This is what we wanted to investigate. In the time and efficiency paradigm, you interpret the result in a certain way, but if you look at it from the social perspective, it becomes different
The AHA project is funded by the State Innovation Program Drive Sweden. In the project, Halmstad University collaborated with Volvo Cars, the City of Helsingborg, Västtrafik, the City of Gothenburg and Skånetrafiken to study attitudes to mobility in two different geographical areas, including by interviewing the people who live there. It was partly living in villages along a road outside Gothenburg and partly living in Drottninghøj, a million programme project in Helsingborg. How do you make the journey as easy as possible for people so that more people want to go by public transport? What was specifically considered were solutions for the “first mile” and “last mile”. Often, society tries to find technological solutions such as apps, self-driving vehicles or parcel delivery with robots to make transportation easier. But when the people in the project were asked about what was important to them, the result was unexpected.
“We discovered that “first and last mile” is a social space that is not always in such a hurry to travel through, continues Vaike Fors. When you get off the bus, you're almost home and it's not always time efficiency that's most important. It turned out in our ethnographic studies that people choose to take detours on the way home from the bus to exchange a few words with acquaintances, or take the opportunity to attend to a few phone calls, take a walk or catch up with the children. If we do not take into account how social life is shaped, we risk finding effective mobility solutions that will be difficult for people to adopt. Therefore, we should not be afraid of solutions that take more time.
The ethnographic methods used were both to interview people in their own environment and to accompany them on their journeys. Based on this and in collaboration with various events and in cooperation with local stakeholders, people and their habits were learned.
“An important principle of the AHA method is to question ideas that are taken for granted today in mobility development and look at them from an ethnographic perspective. For example, it has resulted in us being able to see how local social values are, in some cases, more important to people in their residential area, than time- and resource-efficient transport.
The area of mobility is an area that requires many actors to work together to find good solutions based on people's everyday lives. The AHA II project has therefore developed a toolkit with various communication materials to facilitate communication between different actors, both private and public. The communication materials are based on the results of the ethnographic studies, where important dimensions of people's experiences and ideas about mobility have been made available for discussion across stakeholder boundaries. An example is the 'common ground game', where different aspects of mobility form a game plan for different stakeholders to use in order to discuss possible mobility services from a social perspective and thus, so to speak, end up on 'common ground'; a common ground.
Read more on the project's website.
