CHALLENGE

Finding underlying mobility injustices

Umeå, as a city in northern Sweden, is expanding at a rapid rate and faces numerous sustainability, social and environmental challenges. The focus of this project has been mobility justice in a gendered landscape. The project concerns accessibility and visibility regarding mobility and different public transport services in Umeå. Through a participatory design process and by using interventions we exposed the injustices and power structures that we found in the mobility system of the city. The challenge was not to only to look into the public transportation system, but also to find the underlying social and gendered norms to identify the injustices.

OUTCOME

Ellay - mobility in the moment

Ellay is a digital platform that brings the community around the elderly closer to them, by eliciting curiosity in social interaction. By showing a glimpse of your own life, you can trigger someone else's curiosity, which offers the possibility for the people around to be a part of those moments. The platform facilitates relationships between the elderly and the community by sharing their stories, bringing people into their lives, and bridging the generation gap, which can eventually contribute to a long-term social sustainability.

 RECEIVER (The community)

Join and be a part of the moment

A notification will show the community that an elderly is sharing a moment. By just pressing join people around the elderly can connect with them. The person who wants to join the moment will give the elderly a phone call, confirming that he or she will come. Hearing each others voices before meeting will hopefully establish a relationship between them and elicit the curiosity.

APPROACH

A participatory
design process

During this project we used participation, engagement, provocation and intervention to explore and design new ways of interacting and of sharing power in the society today. When starting this project we went out in the streets of Umeå using the snowball method, meeting and talking to people, generating contacts and starting to pull threads, initially without any specific agenda. As this was still in an early stage of the project, we felt that mobility could be “anything” for “anyone”, depending on whom you were asking or observing. Since we did not have a specific user group in the beginning of the project and the brief was very open for interpretation, we saw the value in just meeting any person and see where this could take us further.

Bringing people’s stories to life

Through ethnographic field research we wanted to understand people’s lifestyles, daily movements and challenges in relation to Umeå, trying to identify mobility injustices in the city. Along with this we also mapped out people’s paths and looked into how they were transporting themselves around in Umeå through simple mock-ups. We also used the photo diary technique, asking people to record how a normal day looks like by sharing texts, pictures and video clips with us online.

How do the elderly approach mobility today?

Special mobility services are in general available, but often not accessible and sometimes even invisible to many of the elderly citizens. This apparent information gap can lead to disappointment, frustration, skepticism and a feeling of injustice among them. Crucial in this information gap is the expectation and the norm that everybody should master a smartphone or have access to a computer. This however is still premature to many of today’s generation of elderly people.

“I travel with the bus without a destination.”

Although many of the elderly feel unsafe outside their home, they love to take the bus. But they are scared walking from their front door to the bus stop, especially during winter time with icy roads. In many cases they have no relatives around to ask for help.

Engage through materiality

Through the research process, workshops with our stakeholders were facilitated with the aim to engage them with our material. With a strong focus on creating tangible and accessible research material, we developed a design kit that was supposed to represent our key findings. The kit was used to engage our stakeholders, but also to give them room to challenge their assumptions.

A street only for the elderly

With the sign telling “above 85 years only” we restricted a certain part of a street to empower the elderly in public and disempower the other people. Through this intervention we wanted to explore how people would react and behave in relation to such a restriction. It turned out not to work at all since people were crossing that road all the time without even paying attention to the sign.

Shared curiosity

When we looked into the current quality of communication in relation to mobility, we could see a distrust and an access gap between the user and provider of the existing services. With the intention to bridge this distrust and access gap we could discover, through our interventions, that provoking curiosity might be a possible way that could trigger new ways of dialogues and human interactions to bring the elderly and community closer.

AESTHETICS OF INTERACTION

Design explorations

To explore our value, shared curiosity, we started to do design explorations with the purpose to learn how this value could take shape and be expressed in a further design concept. Our design explorations were made both with elderly people and other students at our university, the two groups representing each end of the string of communication.

How do you communicate without words?

In our first exploration we placed pictures on one side of the wall and words describing the pictures on the other side. By communicating without words we asked participants to match the right picture with the right word. They found it difficult to communicate, but the ambiguity of message made it fun.

What triggers your curiosity?

To explore what triggers people’s curiosity we developed ten different ways of delivering one message, from fluffy to concrete. The message was “I want milk”. We started with the sounds of a cow and gradually made the message more clear, ending with a text message. We found that the balance between ambiguity and clear expectations is what triggers people’s curiosity.

How would you like to express yourself?

We developed different message mediums and possible versions for elderly to reach out to the surrounding society. The result showed that talking along while video recording was the preferred medium approach by the participant (a non-smartphone user). She found this as an accessible way to communicate and could easily imagine herself using this in her everyday life.

“There is something about hearing someone’s voice in the context that makes me curious.”

- women 24 years old

With our insights from the design explorations we developed our concept on how the elderly and the community could connect through shared curiosity. The way we elicited shared curiosity into the concept was to make use of it as a trigger for action.

Low-fi prototyping

With a low-fi prototype we tested the curiosity of a person when he or she was exposed to previous glimpses or user generated stories of an elderly. We found that a story string helps to create a community engagement that elicits a person’s curiosity; where people connect gradually. Another insight we learnt was that people also need to know a bit more about a person to build trust and a personal connection.

A study shows that 66% of the elderly (above age 75) did not use internet during 2013. Therefore when designing for the future we needed to look into how the next generations elderly would behave in the future. We could see that they are using smart phones today, although sometimes in a limited way. For this reasons we developed the interactions with today’s elderly but also translated these interactions into how they could be used in the future.

User testing the platform

We did validation of the final prototype with both a current volunteer working for the local volunteer organization and also with other students. This gave us further insights regarding the navigation and the flow and if any changes were needed.