News

New project at SAFER to create knowledge about user-involving methodologies: Design Ethnographic Urban Living Labs for Future Urban Mobility – A Human Approach

Jun, 12 2020

We have a new project in our portfolio that will help to increase knowledge about user-involving methodologies; Design Ethnographic Living Labs for Future Urban Mobility – A Human Approach (AHA II). AHA II is a collaborative project between Halmstad University, Volvo Cars, the City of Gothenburg, the City of Helsingborg, Västtrafik and Skånetrafiken, where citizens are involved in developing future mobility solutions. In the project, researchers will establish so-called living labs in two different city districts in Gothenburg and Helsingborg, to engage people in how new mobility solutions can be integrated in their particular neighbourhoods.

AHA II is based on a previous project, Co-Designing Future Smart Urban Mobility Services – A Human Approach (AHA), in which researchers developed a collaborative model for human-centred mobility design with industry and cities. One of the core pillars of the AHA methodology is the use of ethnographic insights to bring new knowledge about the future needs, possible actions and experience of people who will be using future transport technologies and services to designing future MaaS (Mobility as a Service). This focus helps us to understand people beyond being simply citizens (a cities focus) or technology users (a technology industry focus) to instead understand ourselves as people, with our everyday lives, our routines, jobs, social relationships with others, dogs, cats and everything else that makes up the complexities of real life. Many people live in cities and use transport, but neither cities nor transport define our lives. Transport policy researchers agree that very little is known about how people will engage with a feel about MaaS. It is a priority to address this gap in knowledge so that we can design new possibilities that will suit future people and future lives.

The project will be associated to SAFER’s research area Road user behavior. The financier is Vinnova, through Drive Sweden, and the budget is 14 862 000 kr. Vaike Fors, Halmstad University is the project leader. AHA II started in October 2019 and is planned to end in December 2021.

AHA II