AHA research has come to an exciting phase where insights inspire design. The material from our empirical fieldwork is now being used in designing possible future everyday mobility narratives.
Through a series of workshops with user experience-, service- and business designers from industry, urban- and traffic planners from municipalities and researchers from academia we design speculative narratives of possible future mobility solutions. Using speculations as the vehicle allows us to move away from the constraints of commercial practice, imagining the role of autonomous technologies and services in people’s lives, and initiating discussions between different stakeholders. The narratives are informed by ethnographic field work material. For example, concerns and questions raised by citizens’ and urban planners’ voices are highlighted as provocations to trigger further reactions and dialogue. Provocations and questions like how much should shared autonomous service cost, will different service offers increase the gap between wealthy and poor, who is responsible for the autonomous pods, will autonomous services replace public transportation, will cities need to be re-designed to accommodate these services, how should the pods be designed, and who should collaborate to make such services a reality?
Currently, we are working on iterating the speculative narratives and planning on holding another set of workshops to improve the concepts together with citizens from both areas. This part of the research will be finalised by developing “demonstrators” to engage with a wider public about the future of autonomous services in people’s lives.
