Co-production of knowledge for designing inclusive digital mobility solutions – the methodological approach and process of the TRIPS project

Kurzfassung

In 2012 there were 42 million disabled people aged 15–64 years in the EU-27 according to the European health and social integration survey (EHSIS) definition that relates to people with a longstanding health problem and/or a basic activity difficulty and considers a person as disabled when these problems or difficulties act as a barrier to participation in any of 10 life areas (European Commission, 2015). Meanwhile, today’s transport systems remain in considerable parts inaccessible for people with disabilities compromising their equal access to important services, job opportunities, education travel, overall lifestyle choices and capacity for independent living. By ratifying EU Treaties and the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, EU member states have committed to respecting the rights of people with disabilities for independent living and to providing equal opportunities to enjoy seamless, accessible, and independent travel. This, however, has yet to materialize for disabled people in parts of the EU. As transport currently undergoes rapid transformation with new mobility models and transport-related digital solutions coming into play all over the world, it is an opportune moment to design future mobility systems to be inclusive from their beginning. Participatory approaches are a promising way to engage disabled users to become active participants in open innovation since they are experts of their own mobility and access needs. Engaging citizens through participation allows researchers to investigate user needs in complex systems, such as transportation (Bogers, Afuah & Bastian, 2010). Participatory approaches like Action Research (Kemmis & McTaggart, 2005), Participatory Design (Muller, 2009) and Research through Design (Stappers & Giaccardi, 2017) have been established in research and development, yet, there are only few attempts to adopt participatory and co-production to create inclusive mobility solutions (Carmien et al., 2005; Fischer & Sullivan, 2002; Strickfaden & Devlieger 2011). To the best of our knowledge, there have not been participatory projects addressing a comprehensive view on the transport systems and not only elements of it. The goal of the Horizon 2020 project TRIPS (TRansport Innovation for vulnerable-to-exclusion People needs Satisfaction, https://trips-project.eu/) is to design, describe and demonstrate practical steps to empower people with disabilities to play a central role in the design of inclusive digital mobility solutions. The ambition of the TRIPS project is to take practical steps to address and pre-empt discrimination against disabled people in future mobility solutions by empowering them to play a central role in their design. It puts forward a co-design approach that underpins Mandate 473: Design for All to eliminate discrimination and improve Access-for-All to mobility services (European Commission, 2020). The TRIPS project seeks to understand important and often overlooked aspects of user impact and user's ability and readiness to take advantage of the new mobility opportunities by undertaking in depth qualitative and extensive quantitative user research and targeted user involvement in the co-design urban mobility solutions during the pilot studies. The consortium of TRIPS brings together pan-European networks of users, transport organisations, assistive technology experts and municipalities to engage in open innovation on mobility. Supported by design methodology experts, systems integration experts and privacy experts TRIPS will deliver and deploy a Co-design-for-All methodology in 7 European pilot cities – Bologna, Brussels, Cagliari, Lisbon, Sofia, Stockholm and Zagreb.