Introduction – Urban Mobility Design

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Introduction – Urban Mobility Design Chapter Outline Genesis New Technology and New Form Autonomy Accessibility User Experience

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New Ways of Making Creating the Future of Mobility References Further Reading

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On a typical day, among the thousands of commuters in Melbourne, Australia, there are three co-workers heading towards the same office. Their destination is as common as their journeys are different. The first rises early for a fast rail journey into Melbourne from a regional city more than 100 km away. This commute involves walking, regional and metro rail and bus. The second walks a very short distance from an inner-city apartment to a busy railway station, boarding one of the frequent services there for a journey of around 10 km, and alights only 15 min later. At around the same time, our third colleague gets astride a bicycle in one of Melbourne’s suburbs for a 23-km bike ride to the front door of the building. In the process of getting to work, these three commuters, your authors, have very different mobility experiences. These journeys have been planned and orchestrated by them and guided by the intentions of professional transport planning. However, the experiences of their particular journeys have been formed by the objects and landscapes, the physical interactions with the objects of conveyance, comfort, amenity, activity and even their appetites for human contact. The very design of trains, bikes, buses and their infrastructure shape passenger experience, be it pleasant or otherwise. The ability of your three authors to make their journeys in the first place is founded in the principles of transport planning. Integrating a variety of different disciplines around the goal of keeping everyone moving, transport planning responds to a system of inputs and outputs. However, people are also emotional, habitual beings with feelings shaped by an accumulated life experience that is constantly unfolding. Design is the detail that taps into human motivations and aspirations while people are on their journeys. It is a quality that engenders happiness and delight, as well as alienation and aggression if done badly. Design is

Urban Mobility Design. https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-815038-2.00001-3 © 2019 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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cultural, marking out identity and community. It is the lifeblood of the transport system, influencing human behaviours and guiding travel demand. In this book, our three commuters examine the key mobility issues of our time through the lens of design. Clearly, while engineering plays a role in the provision of mobility, it is a necessary yet not sufficient endeavour if we are seeking an ideal state. We assert that there are necessary and sufficient elements that need to exist to create good mobility. Many of the major mobility challenges that confront us will only be met if both the necessary elements that engineering bring are teamed with the sufficient ones of design. By design we mean design approaches in both thinking skills and physical embodiment. Billions of people all over the globe every day in pursuit of their livelihood, shopping, education or leisure, among many more reasons, either enjoy or despair in the manner of their getting anywhere. Our ability to overcome the limitations of our spatial and temporal boundaries has been a triumph of human ingenuity. Most of what we take for granted as mobility, beyond human and animal muscle, has only arisen in the last two centuries. Technologies emerge, reach maturity and are refined through increasingly nuanced and sophisticated design. Design goes beyond the object and embraces the wider mobility sphere, from the traditional base of designing vehicles to now designing whole experiences. It is this position – the ability of design to shape mobility – that this book describes. The word design is used here to describe a broad family of processes applied in various ways to various tasks. Design can be used to figure something out, as a mindset for research and as an applied tool used to create things that respond to the physical and cultural worlds we find ourselves in. Design is not a single methodology but, rather, a family of them, providing ways of carrying out activities towards some end goal. It is particularly useful if such a goal is unknown or elusive; indeed, often we see design’s agency in bringing together other disciplines in a cohesive effort or in solving a wicked problem. In this book we advocate that design is the appropriate tool to bring together knowledge in order to answer some of mobility’s thorny questions. How, for example, will the philosophy of designing desire into cars change in a transport economy that is driverless and shared? In a driverless future, what will intersections look like if we no longer need traffic lights? How will our experience of commuting change when we gain the ability to be productive in transit rather than passively staring out of the window? Are we moving from a view of time in transit as a disutility to it becoming an amenity? This narrative examines the contemporary disruptors that are changing the mobility landscape, from emerging sources of motive power to the connectivity that is leading us to driverless roads, accessible and age-friendly cities where passenger experiences are in the ascendancy, all built in a completely new post-industrial world. In all these spaces, design is the mediator and interpreter between people and the manner in which they travel (Fig. 1.1).

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Mature technology

Emergent technology

Design and refinement

FIG. 1.1 The position of design in emergent technology.

GENESIS As a starting point, let us consider where mobility as we know it today may have come from. At the turn of the 19th century, most people did not live in cities. The wider population was engaged in agrarian employment and would not have expected to travel far beyond the homes in which they were born; indeed, most populations lived and died in the same vicinity (Newby, 1987). The only way to get around on land was by foot or hoof. Walking underpins mobility in many ways. In a historical sense, walking and running were the entire scope of mobility for many thousands of years. In a contemporary setting, walking is still the most appropriate mode for the majority of journeys, and the myriad staircases, ramps, tunnels and signposts evidence how walking fills in the gaps between the more complex human inventions that enable mobility beyond our body. The choice to walk is a ‘design’: the agency of the individual. To walk is to be engaged with our surroundings and to participate in those surroundings in a very direct way. As the scene gradually shifts and our perspective reveals new sights, smells and sounds, we are engaging with the very essence of mobility – experiencing the space between our origin and our destination to the fullest extent possible ( Jacks, 2006). What motivation might have existed during the genesis of mechanically aided mobility? For a nomadic culture, mobility would be a concept so ingrained as to be invisible. To be nomadic is to facilitate survival in the context of what is available from the ecosystem; when food is scarce, move on to where it is not. The evolution and development of an agrarian society gradually gave rise to the notion of a largely sedentary community. The movement of people became more predicated upon the movement of goods for trade. Trade then can tell us about certain aspects of the desire for mobility: if we move more goods, or move them faster or further, than our neighbour, an advantage may be had. The horse has been the pre-eminent beast of burden and primary facilitator of mobility for millennia. Even in the mechanised age, the horse remains in harness for a variety of continuing roles for which it hasn’t been bettered. The animal is strong, agile (as a quadruped, it can scramble over very rough terrain) and has great endurance. Most importantly, it can be domesticated and can socialise, forming companionship with other animals and humans.

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Horses have a number of useful cognitive abilities too, such as spatial discrimination, memory, levels of operant conditioning, and positive and negative reinforcement, all meaning that they can be trained, and as herbivores they are relatively easy to fuel (Chamberlin, 2006). The horse had some competition from humans in some forms of transportation. The sedan chair – the name remains with us today in the description of a particular physical arrangement of car – was a means of carrying a single passenger. Porters would lift the passenger up between two carrying poles onto their shoulders via a yoke to transfer the load. In Asia, similar human-powered offerings manifested themselves as the rickshaw. In this instance, the passenger accommodation later became supported by wheels, thereby relieving the porters of much of the direct load and enabling them to channel their exertions better into forward motion. Individuals could make more of the effort exerted by perambulation by putting their walking motion directly to rotating wheels, and so forms of the bicycle emerged. Slower but far less potentially troublesome than a living creature, the bicycle as we know it today emerged into its resolved form quite rapidly and hasn’t changed a great deal since. The rear-wheel-drive safety bicycle – or bike – opened up the countryside and, with that, the prospect of visiting neighbouring towns and returning all on the same day (Ambrose, 2013). The replacement of horses as the primary means of motive power, at least for heavy lifting, came with the emergence of the steam engine at the end of the 18th century. Performance comparisons between horses and engines led to the idea of measuring steam power in terms of how many horses could perform the same task. This helped market the idea of steam, since it could be more readily understood beside a known quantity. Early steam engine customers might commission an engine to match the output of their best and strongest horse. So, this 18th century measure – weight multiplied by distance divided by time – has endured as the archaic sounding unit of power, although now mostly replaced in metric form by the watt, appropriately named after James Watt, the inventor of steam power. The steady movement away from an agrarian and rural society to an industrial and urban one from the late 18th century onwards was central to the evolution of mobility. The Industrial Revolution heralded major changes in society impacting upon almost every aspect of human experience. The shift from handmade cottage manufacture to mass production had extraordinary consequences upon the economy and society. A significant driver of this change was the ability to create rotary and reciprocating motion automatically and with power an order of magnitude greater than that possible with animals. Steam energy produced a lot of power in relation to its weight. The pressures created to produce steam power could be contained by advances in iron making, one of which was the ability to smelt the metal at high temperatures with coke-coal rather than expensive charcoal. All of this was ideal for creating a new form of engine. Guiding this engine along in terms of direction, while overcoming terrain

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and friction, was done by adapting a long-used mining technique of removing coal and spoil by rolling wheels over rails. In combining the two, Richard Trevithick invented the first moving steam engine or locomotive – meaning ‘place in motion’, which distinguished it from other, more stationary engines. Its eventual effect was as profound to that century as the internet was at the end of the 20th century. In a similar fashion to the sedan chair, the form language of the locomotive was initially governed by physical necessities. As the engineering of the locomotive matured, a dominant form language emerged of the elongated boiler, firebox, cab and tender. Like all feats of engineering before and since, there was a remarkable beauty in the purity of this form for purpose. Before the emergence of industrial design as a profession, the early engineer was more successful if equipped with a sensitivity to form, materials and appearance. A natural beauty emerged as the best engineers of their kind also exercised the role of gestalt ingenieur: negotiating the laws of physics with an eye for the notion of aesthetics. The maturing of rail technology cemented the place of mobility in culture. The sheer physical achievement of the railways led to the emergence of a culture of triumph. People loved the railways. The locomotive was emblematic of this triumph and manufacturers sought to increase its aura. The emergence of streamlining as a style, and indeed the emergence of styling itself as a rational and valuable undertaking, is well illustrated by Raymond Loewy’s work on the locomotives of the Pennsylvania Railroad in the 1930s (Loewy, 1951). Some method of overcoming the surface resistance to movement presented by friction is one thing all modalities have in common. Rails do this for locomotive power. Canals and rivers equally enable waterborne craft to glide along through an otherwise unyielding land mass or between land masses. If general roadways were to compete with rail and facilitate extensive city streetscapes with better transport, something needed to be done about the quality of the running surface. Unsealed roads are prone to rutting, dust and erosion under prolonged heavy loads. Cobblestones provide some answers and many examples remain today, but an expanding road network required a faster and cheaper response. Crushed rock bonded by tar was patented in 1902 and forms the basis for the most popular form of road surface today, bitumen. With this improved road surface performance, and at times rampant expansion, roads facilitated great mobility changes of their own. Steam engine vehicles on roads had been attempted but the absence of a smooth running surface made them an uncompetitive alternative. A smaller engine – still combusting petroleum fuel but to directly drive a piston, rather than creating steam to do the job – emerged in the second half of the 19th century. Directing this energy into wheels that could be propelled along a paved road required advances in suspension and tyres, as well as rudimentary forms of interface between driver and machine to negotiate control of the vehicle. The motor car eventually enabled widespread personal mobility to the masses by not only providing

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the instrument – the car – but also embracing a manufacturing process that made such personal ownership a possibility. Mass production of the type pioneered by Henry Ford still maintained the coach-building form language of passenger accommodation with power placed at the front to haul the passengers forward. Now more sophisticated reins were in the hands of the ordinary person in the form of steering wheel and brake pedals, and so a new set of skills and problems materialised. The invention of the car also heralded the invention of the car driver and the car traffic incident. Nevertheless, the car matured to take the pre-eminent position in mobility as the pinnacle of perceived freedom. In addition to the basic amenity provided by the car, manufacturers go to great lengths to develop brand image and loyalty. Each model is expressive of its owners’ choices in appearance, performance, functionality and price, at least within the range offered (Urry, 2004). Comforts and accessories in cars are growing in sophistication and steadily coming within the reach of many. In car ownership, there is a sense of acceptance within a mobile society (Whitelegg, 1997). For the car driver, pleasure can be derived from the physical act of driving and the sense of accomplishment derived from an acquired skill. Motoring journalists often describe a car’s handling as indicative of the particular car’s performance benefit and especially as part of the pleasure of driving it. Patrons of public transport are not privileged to have such control over their mode of transport; benign acceptance of ride dynamics is the best they can hope for. What, then, should the design of the dynamic experience of a bus aim to achieve? It would appear to be part of the human condition to focus much attention, and sometimes anxiety, upon how we are perceived by others. This is an inevitable side effect of any democratic and largely egalitarian society (De Botton, 2007). The modes of transport, especially the trappings of personal car ownership, play well into this human characteristic. Mark Bunting reflects in his seminal 2004 book Making Public Transport Work that “nothing reflects failure more than being seen taking a bus”. The exception which makes this all the more noticeable is found in Switzerland, where a more egalitarian, even rational, attitude is the norm: Americans may still agree with Honda’s assertion that “you meet the nicest people on a Honda”, but you also meet the nicest Swiss people on a bus. Status is important because it determines how people relate to us: the supervisor and the employee, access to and the wielding of power, and whether or not people are nice to us. Personal ownership contributes to the formation of a self-image through brand recognition. Popular culture, especially television advertising, reinforces these images in depicting cars as functional and desirable but, above all, enabling the freedom of uninterrupted open roads, so much so that people in the former Communist East Germany would wait 20 years for the most rudimentary of cars. The pursuit of a commercial relationship between manufacturer and consumer in personal mobility has certainly preferenced the car industry over public modalities, especially in relation to visual qualities and experiences, perhaps

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with the exception of premium offerings in quasi-public transport such as highend rail and business class flight. There have been persistent and determined attempts by some designers to open up a dialogue between passengers and transport systems to more satisfying and graceful ends. Improved experiences encourage repeat usage. Greater customer satisfaction enables growth in revenue streams and corresponding investment in infrastructure improvements, and thus the cycle becomes ever more virtuous. The following chapters of this book chart a path through the emerging streetscape of urban mobility design, beginning with the fundamental changes in how motive power is achieved and then progressively moving through considerations such as a future in which we will no longer be responsible for directly controlling our vehicles. We explore an improved access to places and conveyances; examine the touchpoints of interface between the means of mobility and the passenger; and consider the revolutionary changes in the way we will be experiencing our mobility in the coming years. The book concludes by discussing the design tools and progressive methods that underpin a human-centric journey experience, and considering how we might use these methods and tools to engage with new issues and challenges as yet unforeseen in the mobility landscape (Fig. 1.2).

NEW TECHNOLOGY AND NEW FORM Radical changes in mobility brought about by leaps in technology in this century, much like the last two, are redefining our relationship with vehicles and infrastructure; this relationship is now digitised, integrated and responding

FIG. 1.2 Structure of the book.

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FIG. 1.3 A continuous cycle of emergent technology followed by design.

more positively to our emotional wellbeing. These developments are driven by design. As the refined form language of our familiar modes of transport reach an advanced state of maturity, they either die out or are re-imagined as new emergent technology that reframes their geometry. And so, the cycle of this arc of emergent, maturing and design refinement continues. This book focuses its attention on the new cycle emerging in the 21st century (Fig. 1.3). In Chapter 2 we explore how future changes in technology, especially in energy and motive power systems, will herald changes in the form language of our otherwise familiar vehicles and infrastructure. Increasing concerns for environmental resilience in the face of global warming and climate change have given impetus to the development of new energy policies and technologies preferencing battery and hydrogen energy sources. Emissions of greenhouse gases continue to grow with implications for the health and wellbeing of the global population. Reports, white papers and research all identify transportation among the fastest growing contributors to CO2 emissions. The enormous scale of this environmental challenge is leading to the realisation that the demand for mobility needs to shift from personal transport to public mobility. The old approach advocated for more roads as part of the solution to congestion. The new approach is that fewer roads may well be the answer. All types of vehicles are a form of temporary accommodation, suitably finessed to reflect the length of time we might expect to be onboard (Votolato, 2007). Electric motors and battery technology have implications for vehicle geometry, enabling improved passenger usability in ways not possible before. From a simple practical standpoint, most of today’s vehicles are encumbered with large energy and power systems that intrude into passenger accommodation. The new and clean energy systems address both environmental concerns and also stand to benefit the passenger in improved accessibility. So levels of comfort while travelling interstate on a bus might be expected to reflect a higher level of finesse than the experience of standing on an underground train for ten minutes. Moving on and off a vehicle and navigating about the space could – and should – be greatly improved by the relocation of energy and drive systems. The integument, or the exterior form, of a vehicle helps direct our interaction with the outside world, whether it be through passive observation from a window, alighting from the wide doors of a train or scrambling out of a golf buggy in the open air. Pedestrians, cyclists and car drivers all respond very differently to the same streetscape, for example in how they

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interpret each other’s intentions and how they are directed by signage, and the level of personal safety and entitlement they feel in relation to a shared piece of road. The form geometry of these vehicular interior spaces manages our expectations and enables at least the semblance of a harmonious coexistence with fellow road users and passengers. The form language of the nacelle – the casings of engines and other fast things – so associated with moving objects, especially the car, has always carried a certain prestige, with the car representing far more than mobility utility. We know that a car is actually an extension of a person’s physical being and also their aspirational and personal expression. A car acts in satisfying both functional and emotional demands. New motive power systems and evolving cultural norms will require designers and patrons to re-evaluate and interpret what our mobility should look like.

AUTONOMY Much human energy over the last few hundred years of the machine age has been dedicated to finding ways of using less of energy in as many tasks as possible. From the most mundane operations to the most sophisticated, automation is the pinnacle of that desire for human freedom from work. Autonomous vehicles (AVs) can be found in industrial settings such as mines, docks and factories. In public transport, driverless railways are no longer the objects of wonder they once were. AVs as a common, if not ubiquitous, part of the roadscape would seem to be still some years away. The technology is maturing quickly and its feasibility as a technology is unquestioned. Incredibly, this technology may well be the simplest part of making autonomous private vehicles part of our lives. Several companies, both mature mobility providers and newcomers alike, have demonstrated the necessary means to make these vehicles work and, further to this, the design language has progressed from a cobbled together car-and-parts mentality to a consolidated, if immature, vehicle. However, there remain a number of impediments and questions to be addressed. The legal and regulatory framework for private AVs is in its infancy. The legal implications are tied to the ethical and social challenges that a driverless car presents. Contemporary society has largely accepted the culpability of a driver at fault, but the notion of a vehicle at fault, and the fundamental ethical questions of robotics that this evokes, are yet to find their logical, ethical and legal conclusions. Advocates of driverless car technology point to speculative advantages such as saving fuel, reducing associated greenhouse gas emissions and air pollution, reducing congestion with innovative vehicle flows and, especially, improving safety, since driver error remains the most common cause of traffic collisions. For each of these speculative advantages a counter argument can be found, for example in the modelling around vehicle occupancy rates per

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kilometre travelled. There may well be too many empty cars on the road, all heading out to pick up their passengers, the burden of driving removed but not the burden of dependence on a finite road network. Humans might take as many vehicle trips as before, but the vehicles can now make trips of their own. With the removal of the status and joy of driving, and perhaps also the reflected glow of possession, driverless technology points the way towards the shared ownership of cars. This could mean a reduced fleet of vehicles, since they would be working all the time rather than parked for 90% of the time as is currently the case. Does this mean a reduction in required parking spaces, only to be replaced by an increase in congestion? Driverless cars also mean that those unable to drive in the past, for example children and the very elderly, might now find themselves on the road. The separation of human beings from the driving seat and the enclosure of a system around the car make the driverless car a form of quasi-public transport, raising the question of how humans react to something that doesn’t appear to be owned by anyone. We can take taxis, taxi systems such as Uber, Lyft, Shebah (for women only) and car-sharing schemes as the precursors to this imagined shared future. Travelling in a publicly served vehicle removes the personal connection with the car. What new anxieties will emerge when engaging with an AV about what we might find aboard, experiences normally reserved for the bus, tram and train passenger? These anxieties will need to be addressed by design. The normal associations of brand and status that come with ownership may change if, in a driverless environment, vehicles are shared. In a privately owned driverless community, however, differences in amenity and vehicle form language might well remain as the cachet of possession. The prevailing orthodoxy in terms of seating orientation and arrangement for the private car has been predicated on the driver and passengers facing the direction of travel. If no individual is any more responsible for the command and control of the vehicle than any other, then the interior geometry might rightly be re-explored in a new emerging context of travel. Central to what an AV may provide in contrast to a driven vehicle is the notion that mobility isn’t a thing, but a service. But if mobility is a service, then why do we spend so much time designing and making all that stuff? Roads, cars, bicycles, railways: are they all redundant in this view? Is it now passe to love our cars? No, fear not, it isn’t, but what we can learn from the concept of Mobility as a Service (MaaS) is that the concept of the manner in which mobility is carried out is now front and centre, rather than a mere consequence of all those things like roads, bicycles and railways. Essentially, this flips centuries of thinking on mobility design. Where we used to worship the object, we can now see that it might be more useful to focus at times on the experience provided and the service this object creates or, better yet, mediates. MaaS in particular is a good example of how a service is created not through a singular thing but through

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a collection of contributors. This means that it is still okay to get excited about our cars, whether they are AVs or not. It’s just that, in the design of mobility, working out how all of these things are going to come together is the new challenge of the day. A perceived advantage of public transport over the private car is that passengers are free to engage in other distractions and therefore make more of their time in transit (Redmond and Mokhtarian, 2001). Travelling by public modes has always enabled the passenger passive moments of disengagement from the world. The driverless car presents an opportunity for distraction that re-values in-vehicle time and affords a wider and more tailored travel experience. If we consider the many and varied activities that public transport passengers engage in, then the opportunities for amusement, work and even rest in the new private car could become a greater asset than, and even displace, ownership as status.

ACCESSIBILITY I want to die peacefully in my sleep like my grandfather, not screaming in terror like his passengers. (Anon)

Providing adequate quality of life and safety for a large ageing population is recognised by the developed world as a serious social concern. The coming decades will most likely result in a greater number and greater proportion of the global population being of advanced age. This positive consequence of decades of improvement in health and wellbeing now presents society with new challenges, one of which is a commitment to lifelong mobility. After all, if we’re going to live longer, we’ll need to participate in society for longer too. Mobility is integral to engagement with employment, education, leisure and society as a whole. The physical and mental decline of the human body with age makes seniors vulnerable to mobility disadvantage. Participation in society in advanced countries is heavily predicated on the access to and ability to drive a car. Personal transport is the key element of social inclusion. Moving from a car-driving life to one of public transport can be very challenging. And even then, public transport doesn’t remove all the problems associated with ageing. The mobility needs of the elderly are as great as those of the younger non-retired population, although with their own nuances, such as more trips to medical facilities and more movements during the day outside peak periods. The end of our tenure as a driver, through either choice or imposition, can create the need for major life adjustment, all the more so if we live in the suburbs, where the urban form is predicated on the private car. Mobility alternatives such as walking and public transport offer much diminished range, speed and accessibility. Cycling too has its barriers, although these are being overcome to an extent with

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electric bikes ( Johnson and Rose, 2016). The perceived loss of independence can also lead to great resentment. Having a mobility-active senior population is a matter of not only social activity but also public safety. Design is the key arbiter of providing acceptable public transport alternatives. Elderly patrons on public transport present their own set of considerations for the designer. Moving from a life behind the wheel to one on public transport requires accessibility. As we have seen and will go on to observe in more detail, the impediments to an accessible transport infrastructure are many, including steps and climbing issues, finding a seat and cognitive navigation of a complex system that is challenging enough for the youthful. Even with these impediments minimised, personal balance issues and falls are far more frequent for older people in the public domain and with much more severe implications for health and wellbeing (Blenkandaal and Mooij, 2000). However, not all is doomed. The mentality of the designer with regards to the concept of disability offers some refreshment: that disability is imposed not by the human beings but by what we’ve constructed around them. Along with staircases, we have developed ramps and lifts – far from ideal, but making stairs no longer the insurmountable barriers they once were. What we can take from this is that the means of delivering mobility is just part of a built environment over which we have significant control, should we wish to exercise it. Matching the machines to the humans, as in the field of ergonomics, is not a new discipline. The know-how is well within our current grasp as a society; it is only that the goalposts are shifting to bring greater emphasis to the aged and ageing population. Along with these demographics, social attitudes are also shifting towards a more inclusive ideal of the built environment, rather than designing for the ablebodied adult. Designing mobility for the young, old, blind and mechanically challenged, to name but a few, is becoming the new normal, with significant benefits for those who are in the fortunate majority and aren’t personally affected by such ailments – at least for the time being.

USER EXPERIENCE Give me one minute – just one minute – inside the skin of this creature. Hook me up for just sixty seconds to the perceptual and conceptual apparatus of this other being – and then I will know what natural historians have sought through the ages. (Gould, 1998, quoted in Epley et al., 2007)

Although understanding what it is like to be in the mind of another may sometimes feel as elusive as in the natural historian’s observation before, we at least have the advantages language and discourse can give us to convey our perceptions of things. Experience is the contact with and observation of an event through exposure to it, filtered through our emotional state of mind at the time. Our experiences are embodied in thought, perception, memory and imagination.

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They are individually experienced and shared through social norms, customs, values and expectations. Interactions between people and organisations prompt a whole set of experiences in relation to their staff, their premises, their brand as it is communicated materially, their services or goods. People are exposed to an emotional response to each encounter with an organisation, from indifference to highly negative or positive feelings. These sensitivities are informed by our disposition towards the event we are experiencing. Was it better in the past or is it entirely novel? Does it align with our values, needs and satisfactions? Some organisations go to great lengths to add positive experiences to their interactions with their patrons. They look for participation and connection generally to engender loyalty. The notion of what design provides has gradually matured and expanded from the modernist, post–World War Two focus on the object to a postmodern and even post-material focus on the experience. While the ways that experiences are created are still manifestly object oriented, a commercial design project is now just as likely to emphasise the experience of use as the material and aesthetic. This shift of focus from a manufactured object perspective to that of creating an experience and all the different elements that this embodies is very well demonstrated in mobility. There has been a steady growth in research into what experiences an object or space may engender so that they might be refined and improved upon. There has also been the establishment of some terms of engagement describing how humans interact with things. An affordance is one of the means that a product might provide for our interaction. Buttons afford pressing, doorknobs afford pulling, windows afford looking and typography affords reading. The consideration of affordances gives designers a direct link between the tangible elements of a design and how it might help somebody achieve their goals. If we have a sense of what a product needs to do, we can load it with the appropriate affordances for doing so (Norman, 1988). So, what if our product should afford pleasure? One of the aims of our product might be that it can make a person feel pleased – but we need to consider what the outcome might actually be; for example in public transport, we tend to aim for some state of being which might be nice enough to ignore ( Jordan, 2000). If a bus needs to afford pleasure to the user, then the designer can consider how influence could be brought to bear on the qualities of upholstery, air temperature or vibrations. If affordances are our means to facilitate action, then on the opposite side of the coin are constraints. Constraints, either hard or soft, are ways by which we can hope to deter, or even eliminate, interactions which are undesirable. We might be motivated to constrain certain behaviours in our users in order to keep them, or our product, safe from harm. Often constraints are useful to keep people safe from the infinite ways in which things could be done incorrectly (Norman, 1988). The number of constraints in our built environment can be overwhelming to consider, but look for instance at how a closed door constrains you from falling out of a train or a hospital tap constrains you from burning

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yourself with hot water. At times these constraints are so well resolved that we come up against them without even noticing their noble work. A well-designed constraint can be the silent guardian of the built environment. Affordances, and to a lesser extent constraints, carry out their work with the action of signification. Thus our aforementioned doorknob both affords door opening and signifies that such is its purpose by looking like a doorknob. It is important to note that signifiers depend largely on our life experiences and learned behaviours around things. A protrusion on a door at hip height, we have learned, is indeed usually there for operating the door. There is a range of generally accepted and expected forms that a doorknob can take and we urban humans usually have a stock of knowledge around how to operate these. As such, a designer should take great care when embarking on some stylistic departure from them, as it will place a new learning requirement onto the user which may not be palatable. In addition, a designer needs to have some knowledge of the culture in which a solution might be placed, as that culture might differ from others and an undesirable result could ensue (Molotoch, 2003). The various cultural interpretation of colours is an example. White is a bridal colour in many western cultures and yet funereal in Asian cultures. Products signify their use by means of their form, whether physical, electronic or both. A small vessel with a handle will signify that it is a teacup. An X symbol in a screen-based computer interface should signify removal or closure. A more sophisticated version of signifiers is sometimes necessary. In situations where there are many actions and possible product reactions, it is necessary for a user to be able to relate particular features of a design to particular outcomes. This is what Don Norman (2005) eloquently refers to as the “gulf of execution” – I know what I want to achieve, but I don’t know how to get there. Once we can relate actions to results, we can normally cross the gulf, and this act is referred to as mapping – relating one thing in the world to another in relation to the scope of our intended use. Drawing a connection between action and consequence can be as simple as the system of our now well-worn doorknob example. Where mapping really comes to the fore is in complex systems, the types usually found on large scales such as mobility systems and on small scales in electronic devices. Both of these are systems where there are a range of possible outcomes for any number of actions. A passenger might be guided through a series of decisions in order to arrive at a particular railway station platform. Each of the decisions can be mapped out and the passenger asked to execute their decision by taking a turn down a particular passage with a known consequence. Some readers will recognise this as the experience afforded by many larger stations in the London Underground. The series of decisions has been successfully mapped onto distinct architectural features of, say, Oxford Circus Station, to enable transfer from Eastbound on the Central Line to Northbound on the Victoria Line. Something as outwardly functional as a bus will need to have some consideration of emotional response in potential users. As a piece of our built

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environment, a bus is impossible to ignore and thus has a role to play. Also, if you are going to the trouble of manufacturing something and you can make it beautiful or elegant, then shouldn’t you? Most people are familiar with the field of ergonomics, sometimes called human factors. Ergonomics is the complex field of fitting the built environment around humans and the tasks they wish to perform. What we’re getting into here is the branch called cognitive ergonomics. The idea is that, just as we have an imperative to design an office task chair that is mechanically suitable for sitting, so we should design the adjusters on this chair in such a way that they are cognitively suitable for adjusting. In other words, people need to be able to understand the consequences of their actions: pull this lever and the chair lowers. Or, in our mobility tasks: walk this way and you’ll get to platform nine. Further to the notion of user experience is how people are predisposed to interpret things. These predispositions concern designers and users in a significant way through the notion of aesthetics. To consider how aesthetics might work and then apply this to our idea of usability and emotions in mobility design, we first need to look briefly at some human history. As a species, we – Homo sapiens – predate the built environment by some hundreds of thousands of years. During this time, not to mention the millions of years of mammalian evolution from which we came, evolution provided a means for us to become attuned to various external stimuli which might give us a better chance at living and reproducing. Thus the regular sound of bird call might have been conceived as something pleasant because it signalled a potential source of dinner. A cracking tree branch was something that signalled danger, rotting flesh a potential source of illness and sweet-smelling fruit a desirable food. Whether in pursuit of sustenance, a mate or the avoidance of danger, these interactions between the world and us, by means of our senses, have shaped what we humans today still carry around as Darwinian preferential aesthetic foundations. Therefore, we generally like most flowers, the smells of most fruits, the appearance of graceful, symmetrical, regular forms. An often cited and debated manifestation of this theory can be found in classical studies of the philosophy of geometry and nature ending in such forms as the golden ratio, attributed to various origins including Euclid and da Vinci. What this evolutionarily ingrained knowledge has led to in the field of design is a set of guiding principles which designers can apply in their craft. Since we know that our human users carry with them some overarching preferences for how things should be, the design principles of balance, proximity, alignment, repetition, contrast and space become our ways of manipulating things in order to make something. These principles are essentially our way of mimicking the appeal of nature. The same principles apply whether that something is a product, system, service or experience, and this includes both the physical world and the user experiences within it. We also need to consider the sensation of being physically moved. At worst, it will induce motion sickness; at best, it can encourage people to purchase cars. The emotional aspects of

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human needs as they are expressed in function, aesthetics and materiality have been long understood by the automotive industry in the development and marketing of its products. This aligns with the knowledge that a human’s emotional response to a product is closely related to perceived usability. In Chapter 5 we will discuss how nice things are easier to use. Taking the wholly unhuman but nevertheless ingrained kinaesthetic pleasure of driving a car as a baseline, good – that is to say, appealing – automotive design creates a milieu of functional, aesthetic and haptic experiences that contribute to the pleasure of driving and, to a lesser extent, travelling as a passenger. For a passenger on public transport, much of these pleasures of interaction are lost (Coxon et al., 2007). The dynamic differences in how a bus moves over the same stretch of road as a car are significant, an experience exacerbated by the way bus passengers are passively subjected to whatever bumps might come their way. This increases the chasm of experience between these two modes as they are today. While there may be little opportunity to replicate the experience of a private car in contemporary public transport, new emerging shared experiences will change this. Furthermore, when we consider the design of mobility as a broad-ranging user experience, there is little but contemporary social orthodoxy to suggest that public transport should replicate the car. Why are public and private vehicles so vastly different? Like any tool, each must fit the task for which it is designed, and the tasks can vary to a large extent. Taking one example, the duty cycle of the vehicles immediately shows how the material differences end up as being so vast. A private car spends much time parked, even garaged, whereas a bus is expected to be on the road for some 12–18 h a day and to cover something in the order of a million kilometres over its functional life of 10–20 years. This high volume of use carries the consequence of a different approach to the refinement and robustness of the vehicle. The role of public transport as a mass carrier generally requires people to walk as they move to and from vehicles, thus creating high-sided ‘boxes’ rather than sleek low forms built around seated accommodation. Although there are notable exceptions to this, they are in the minority for now. Humans are social creatures and we generally like to be with others, but only on our own terms. The public domain immediately creates a lack of privacy. Distracting and annoying use of mobile phones and the risk of threatening and antisocial behaviour of others are part of the personal ‘contract’ entered into upon boarding public transport. Unsupervised station and bus stop areas can be a cause for concern around safety, especially at night. Transfer from one mode to another is time wasting and frustrating. Access to information and its interpretation are causes for anxiety as passengers try to understand where to go next and avoid becoming stranded. These experiences, whether real or imagined, all combine to create decision factors other than just journey time and cost. What we can discern from user experience is that there are both a functional and an experiential way of viewing mobility. There are some useful terms for describing this difference, one such set being instrumental and affective.

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The instrumental side of mobility concerns what is being provided – in other words, how much mobility? This might be measured in how far, fast or frequent a service is, and really relates to the mode’s ability to move us, or some goods, somewhere in some time. The affective side concerns the manner in which this mobility is provided – is it comfortable, cognitively burdensome, simple or noisy? The affective elements of mobility concern us with touchpoints ranging from minor irritations through to interactions which could completely block us from getting somewhere – as in a railway station, bus terminus or bike-share app so baffling that we miss our service. One example we will return to later in this chapter is how the instrumental and affective elements of mobility can be used to view the chasm of experience between the private car and public transport: both will get you there, but in vastly different manners. The private car is selling you an experience first and mobility second, and it would appear that, in most cases, if people can afford to pay the vast premium of a private car over public transport they will, and user experience provides some of the rationale. Human emotion is a state of mind deriving from our personal circumstances, moods or relationships. It is instinctive and intuitive, distinct from reasoning and knowledge. The study of the connection between human emotion – particularly positive emotion – and manufactured objects has, in recent years, variously derived from usability design and, more latterly, experience design. These have been drawn from the fields of ergonomics and psychology, although designers and architects might rightly feel that they have been attempting to make this emotional connection between objects and people for very many years (Forty, 1986). Human pleasure has been connected to the pinnacle of human needs and, since design is a discipline dedicated to meeting human needs, pleasure in the use of an object should be the ultimate goal (Molotoch, 2003).

NEW WAYS OF MAKING One of the great feats of accessible automobility was the Model T Ford. Through an intense, lengthy endeavour at the hands of Henry Ford, the cost of this car reduced in real terms significantly over the course of its life. The Ford production line was itself a feat of mobility, with the jobs and materials being brought to the operator by means of a moving production line. From this, the pre-existing rationale of factories that were based on Taylorism evolved into Fordism, an impressive, if somewhat threatening, array of social and technical innovations designed to get the most cars out of a production line. Fordist ideals extended well beyond the factory floor, into the homes and personal lives of employees. As such, the Ford Motor Company created avenues into the lifestyles of its employees far beyond their generous pay: Ford dictated in close terms the roles of family members and ideal dwellings. It was this mixture of technical and social – sociotechnical – innovation which eventually led to

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the demise of the modernist, Fordist approach and the rise of a postmodern approach, nevertheless rooted in the Fordist past. At the turn of last century, the now-stabilised Fordist/post-Fordist sociotechnical frame was flourishing with disruptive innovations like the radio, wireless signalling, aeroplane, theory of relativity, automobile and moving production line. Likewise, at the turn of the 21st century we are witnessing paradigmshifting innovations like autonomy, artificial intelligence, complex information management systems, sensor-based networks, immersive virtual worlds, 3D printing and distributed digital manufacturing. Among these, a socially driven maker culture is playing a role in democratising production technologies, which has opened novel opportunities for the way we make objects – of particular interest here is the opportunity for localised distributed manufacturing. This will likely change the ways we make and access artefacts and open new paths for industrialisation. At the intersection of these 20th and 21st century approaches, there are remarkable similarities between the ideologies at the centre of Henry Ford’s inception of mass production and the disruptive innovation of maker culture. Ford’s values of service, waste minimisation and generosity are highly relevant to maker culture today, even though the methods for achieving them differ. Dale Dougherty, the founder of Make magazine, describes maker culture as a movement that has emerged “because of people’s need to engage passionately with objects in ways that make them more than just consumers”. More commonly known under the alluringly alliterative moniker ‘maker movement’, this distributed global network of communities is largely connected by the internet and, in many instances, facilitated by digital production tools. Makers design, tinker with and make artefacts; repair and hack products; discover new ways of tackling problems and educate others to do the same. Newly available domestic-scale digital production tools expedited by opensource hardware development, such as 3D printers, laser cutters and CNC machines, allow traditionally non-workplace environments to become sites of production. Consequently, factories of the future need not be co-located in industrial parks, but could be instead distributed across thousands of locations throughout the community and coordinated by virtual integration platforms. This decentralised approach perhaps represents a comprehensive realisation of post-Fordist ideals, with a strong resemblance to Ernest Sternberg’s new age of capitalism, which he says demonstrates a strong advocacy of knowledge economies and information technology, globally networked interdependence, flexible specialisation, the rejection of technocracy and egalitarianism, equitability and the humanisation of capitalism (Sternberg, 1993). In this respect, where Ford’s values and those of maker culture converge around service, waste minimisation and generosity, they diverge in their approaches to the agency of the end-user. Ford achieved the democratisation of product through processes of labour division, standardisation and economies of scale; maker culture conflates labour divisions and achieves the

Introduction – Urban Mobility Design Chapter

Fordism

Homogenised consumers

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Maker Culture

Generalised products

Few skilled people

1

Specialised products

Many skilled people

Individualised consumers

FIG. 1.4 Contrasting Fordism with the maker movement.

democratisation of manufacturing through open and mutable design that allows anyone to make one-off artefacts. In other words, Ford encouraged skill specialisation by the few to make generalised products for the many, while maker culture advocates skills appropriation by the many to make specialised products for the few, as contrasted in Fig. 1.4. While maker ideology aims to counter the alienation of the worker from the joy of labour, it comes with a range of issues for which the repercussions of the ‘long tail’ of this newfound cultural production are yet to be seen.

CREATING THE FUTURE OF MOBILITY The days of awe and wonder at the means of mobility are arguably over. The romance and futurism of the railway, the internal combustion engine and the aircraft have diminished as these modes have become commonplace, at least for most. This is part of a shift in emphasis from the provision of mobility in an instrumental sense – how far how quickly? – to mobility in an affective sense – how far how quickly how well? Since people are active beings, not cargo, the means by which mobility is provided and the qualities of such provision are the new competitive platforms upon which mobility functions. In the final chapter, the methods and tools for exploring design and mobility are brought together. We have seen that, in terms of design and designing as ontology, there is a shift from the purely physical to embrace the intangible too. Design has reinvented itself for a wider constituency as a problem-solving and innovation-creating tool. This is especially so in the emergence of new niche disciplines such as experience and service design. At the simplest level, the design process is quite generic: the sequencing of divergent and convergent thinking techniques to approach a new solution. The process shapes ideas in response to what we can experience or know of a problem. Mobility challenges are complex, multi-layered beasts and often contain ambiguity. The design cognition process described by Nigel Cross (2006) in

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Designerly Ways of Knowing is characterised as being solution focused, rather than problem focused, oscillating between the analytical and visual conjecture. Design thinking is a very contemporary set of techniques and approaches that capture this duality between two modes of problem-solving; words and symbols on one side of the brain and spatial, visual and creative abilities on the other (Tovey, 1984). Approaching wicked problems, challenges that are ill defined and ambiguous, such as those that populate the mobility futurescape, require a nimble balance between these two modes of thinking (Cross, 2006). Design thinking has proliferated in the business community in recent years, fostered by the proposition that it is a discipline-agnostic, non-expert set of tools that enables everyone to be a ‘designer’. These tools and approaches can be set to business and social problems and don’t necessarily lead to traditional artefact outcomes. This is both its strength and weakness. In many ways, a concern with and focus on addressing the complex and varied needs of human beings have always been in the repertoire of at least a good designer’s problem-solving approach. Designing solutions to user-centred needs requires an empathetic approach on the part of those doing the designing. This has not always been as successful as anticipated and so design thinking does construct a framework for a more empathetic approach to designing: the championing of the passenger in mobility issues, rather than the designer’s indulgent sweep of a vehicle surface or sophisticated material detail. Naturally, a successful design solution should accomplish both, since the aesthetic is also a need too. It is not enough for human sensibilities for something to just work. It needs to work well and elegantly. Design has become far more participatory. Part of this empathetic ethos is to credit everybody with creative ability and acknowledge that, in the end, they are the experts in their own lives (Sanders and Stappers, 2016). Design thinking breaks up and packages the key steps of a designer’s generic process and lays them out as a step-by-step how-to guide. Critics of design thinking point to this democratisation of the design process as diminishing design as a tool of exploration, because people do know their own lives but not those of others or ways of doing things by different methods. We’re all prisoners, in other words, of our own limited experience. Designers, by consequence of their training, are open to making the sorts of dislocated connections that lead to the spark of a new idea, looking at a given issue with a curious slant and making the lateral jumps from one thing to another that are indicative of a creative and inventive personality. For many involved at the very cutting edge of technology, the challenges of design are all the greater as we have no experience, professional or otherwise, to fall back on. How would we know that we’d like a Porsche if we’d never seen one? Would many of us ever have come up with the idea of an icon-driven touchscreen smartphone 20 years ago? Of course, in the end we might take a blended approach – each problem is unique and, as such, so may be the tools to solve it. Empathetic research can enable us to understand people’s lives more deeply. The participatory aspects

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of design could go some way towards demystifying the value and approach of design to a lay audience. And indeed, this is one of the intended outcomes of this book – an awareness of design’s role in mobility can serve our professional community better. While a participatory approach is valuable, we also advocate that there are core skills, and losing all the skills and talent embodied in a good designer’s gift and experience would be a shame, although it is telling that perhaps one of the most emblematic and influential pieces of user-centred transport design is the London Tube map, first printed in 1933 and designed by an electrical draftsman, Harry Beck, rather than a graphic designer. It could be argued that here we have an example of someone who was both a lay non-designer and a person skilled in a craft who, importantly, brought together two otherwise totally disparate concepts: the nomenclature of an electrical diagram and the notion of a wayfinding map, quite normal from our contemporary way of thinking but an utterly bizarre ‘diagram of lines’ when first presented to London Underground (Dobbin, 2012). This is indicative of how an idea can be generated by the bringing together of unnatural bedfellows to create a new way of thinking. Beck’s map, and countless other innovations since, demonstrate that design is not the exclusive purview of designers. Creativity can and often does come from unexpected quarters. In the context of our current mobility needs, and future ones yet to become apparent, design is a very powerful tool in itself.

REFERENCES Ambrose, T., 2013. The History of Cycling in 50 Bikes. Allen and Unwin, Sydney. Blenkandaal, F., Mooij, T., 2000. Public transport injuries in the Netherlands. Inj. Control Saf. Promot. 7, 271–274. Bunting, M., 2004. Making Public Transport Work. McGill-Queens University Press, Montreal, Canada. Chamberlin, J.E., 2006. Horse: How the Horse Has Shaped Civilizations. Bluebridge, New York, NY. Cross, N., 2006. Designerly Ways of Knowing. Springer, London, UK. Coxon, S., Napper, R., Allen, J., 2007. The role of industrial design in addressing the disparity between user perceptions of public and private transport. In: Proceedings of the 30th Australiasian Transport Research Forum, Melbourne. De Botton, A., 2007. The Architecture of Happiness: The Secret Art of Furnishing your Life. Penguin, London. Dobbin, C., 2012. London Underground Maps: Art, Design and Cartography. Lund Humphries. Epley, N., Waytz, A., Cacioppo, J.T., 2007. On seeing human: a three-factor theory of anthropomorphism. Psychol. Rev. 114 (4), 864–886. Forty, A., 1986. Objects of Desire: Design and Society Since 1750. Thames and Hudson, London. Gould, S.J., 1998/2011. Can we truly know sloth and rapacity? In: Leonardo’s Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms. Three Rivers Press, New York, NY, pp. 375–391. Jacks, B., 2006. Reimagining walking. J. Archit. Educ. 57 (3), 5–9. Johnson, M., Rose, G., 2016. E-bike safety: insights from a survey of Australian e-bike riders. In: 95th Annual Meeting of the Transportation Research Board, Washington DC.

22 Urban Mobility Design Jordan, P., 2000. Designing Pleasurable Products—An Introduction to the New Human Factors. Taylor and Francis, London/New York. Loewy, R., 1951. Never Leave Well Enough Alone. John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, MD. Molotoch, H., 2003. Where Stuff Come From; How Toasters, Toilets, Cars, Computers, and Many Other Things Come to Be as They Are. Routledge, New York. Newby, H., 1987. A Country Life: A Social History of Rural England. New York NY, Barnes and Noble. Norman, D., 1988. The Design of Everyday Things. Doubleday, New York, NY. Norman, D., 2005. Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things. Doubleday, New York, NY. Urry, J., 2004. The ‘system’ of automobility. Theory, Culture and Society 21 (4–5). Redmond, L., Mokhtarian, P., 2001. The positive utility of the commute: Modelling ideal commute time and relative desired commute amount. Transportation 28, 179–205. Sanders, B., Stappers, P., 2016. Convivial Toolbox—Generative Research for the Front End of Design. BIS Publishing, Amsterdam. Sternberg, E., 1993. Transformations: The Eight New Ages of Capitalism, Mimeo, Department of Planning and Design. State University of New York, Buffalo, NY. Tovey, M., 1984. Designing with both halves of the brain. Des. Stud. 5 (4), 219–228. Votolato, G., 2007. Transport Design: A Travel History. Reaktion, London, UK. Whitelegg, J., 1997. Critical Mass: Transport, Environment and Society in the Twenty First Century. Pluto, Chicago, IL.

FURTHER READING De Botton, A., 2002. The Art of Travel. Penguin, London. Tovey, M. (Ed.), 2012. Design for Transport: A User-Centred Approach to Vehicle Design and Travel. Gower, Surrey.