INFUZE aims to develop an innovative framework for participatory urban mobility science. We see new sustainable urban mobility systems, and their constituent parts, as needing to be made with society, rather than society being made ready for them. This means basing our work on participatory and inclusive design, design futures and the integration of technical tools with that design, evaluation and learning process. We need to open up the ‘black box’ of transport planning so people can ask the difficult questions they want answers to.
To imagine zero carbon mobility futures where you don’t need to own a car requires us to enable citizens to explore, understand or design the new options and opportunities emerging and to creatively generate solutions that work for them. We will work with schools, communities and businesses to understand the hopes and fears and the practicalities that influence people’s ways of getting around and what they want from future transport systems. These approaches are delivered through our first workpackage (Co-Design)
From this creative process we will build new psychological and economic behavioural data collection instruments to understand, in more generalisable terms, what attributes of services and systems impact on propensity to change. For example, how far in advance would it be acceptable to book a vehicle for a journey and how do people trade off convenience and cost when travelling alone compared to with their family or friends? We need to understand how different this is across areas and communities. Our key methodologies build from social psychological and choice modelling theories using panel survey methodologies to track change over time through our second workpackage (Understanding Change Potential).
The insights from this work and that of workpackage one will tell us about what people are looking for in a transport system and how they might use it. Knowing how to model and represent mobility futures which work differently from those in play today is difficult and there will be many interacting factors. To enable the advantages of different system combinations to be understood we will design and iteratively develop an innovative Agent Based Model to identify which pathways are likely to be generative of path changing possibilities across space and time. Importantly we will also develop new visualisation tools with input from our communities so that the implications of different options can be easily understood and they can, ultimately, ask questions of the model. This will be delivered through our third workpackage (Building Design Solutions).
Finally, we want to test out the design ideas people have for real. Over the five years of the project we will step through an increasingly ambitious design process to create experimental conditions which look and feel different to the options available to people today. We have set aside funding to radically change incentive structures to mimic new tax and payment systems, to rethink the use of space, as well as partnered with a range of suppliers of innovative mobility services to create different mobility offers. The kinds of futures which are designed could take many shapes, for example with more use of light electric vehicles, home based-servicing or a greater focus on digital demand-responsive services. Each will have very different demands for physical assets and space as well as different profiles of use of vehicles and different lifespans of vehicles. We therefore underpin the carbon emission impact assessment with a life-cycle emissions model which enables the wider systemic implications of the mobility system over time to be captured and compared in our fourth workpackage (Evaluation and Governing Change).
