Enjoying reliable education & company partnerships in Active8
Over the years we have conducted people-centred research together on autonomous future mobilities in various projects, and have been developing ways to create bridges between ethnographic engagement with people and places, industrial development and urban planning. And now it is time to invite students into the partnership and learn from their experiences and ambitions, and at the same time develop our long-standing collaboration from an educational perspective. In these times, when we have understood the necessity and urgency of interdisciplinarity when developing people- and planet-centric sustainability solutions, I think it is key for higher education to engage students and provide them with opportunities to develop interdisciplinary skills and experiences. Participating in Active8-Planet creates an opportunity to reflect on these issues, and the key principles for these kinds of engagements. What does it take to infuse industrial technical development with social science and design ethnography? Looking back at our long-term collaboration with Volvo Cars we have learned a few things through both mistakes and successes. And the conclusion is that even though it might be hard to create common people- and planet-centric agendas across industry, cities and academia, it is sure worth a try! I will give a couple of examples below.
Photo 1: This is how happy an international, interdisciplinary multi-stakeholder team of researchers, developers and urban planners look like when coming together to develop people-centric mobility solutions. Including Halmstad University, Monash University, Aarhus University, Volvo Cars, Helsingborg City, Gothenburg City and Public Transport companies. Photo: Patrik Palo
How it all started
Our collaboration with Volvo Cars began in 2014 when I was approached by Robert Broström, senior technical leader at Volvo Cars, with a special interest in user experience and interaction design. We started to talk to each other about the development of self-driving cars and the fact that the technology had come so far that it was possible to not only imagine a future use of self-driving cars, but also to research what happens when people use such technology in cars on public roads. We came to the conclusion that design ethnographic research could be one key to fully understand the potentials of automated vehicles, since it would be able to provide insights into how people go about solving their everyday logistics as well as their fears, hopes and imaginations for how these technologies could be part of their future social life. We decided on bringing together our two different teams of researchers and developers, our international ethnographically oriented social scientific team at Halmstad University and the more psychology/technically oriented team of researchers and developers at the UX department at Volvo Cars. What brought us together was our joint interest in how emerging technologies are perceived, experienced and used, and we outlined the HEAD-project – Human Experiences and Expectations on Self-Driving Cars – funded by VINNOVA between 2016-2018. This was the first ever research project led by Volvo Cars that had its foundation in tailor-made applied ethnographic research methods within the framework of a multidisciplinary research model. By introducing everyday life based research through design anthropology, sociology, pedagogy, and informatics to the more laboratory and experimental set-up at Volvo Cars, was inspiring. And a lot of hard work.
Understanding self driving cars through cards
For a social science researcher, the set-up of the HEAD project was an amazing opportunity. Volvo Cars invested in providing families with cars that were equipped with the newest self-driving technologies available and we got the opportunity to follow these people for 1,5 years by doing ethnographic fieldwork in their homes, when they were driving, and by inviting them to events where they got to see and try cutting edge self-driving technologies. Part of our research was to provide the project with ethnographic materials that could be used to develop insights together with our industry partners, for example tailored AD futures cards to be used in workshops. These cards literally brought people’s everyday life to the table, since they structured our ethnographic findings in 10 themes based on real-life stories, insights, implications, questions and future scenarios. These and other ethnographic impact materials that we have produced can be downloaded for free here.
Photo 2: A deck of workshop cards with ethnographic insights about people’s experiences and expectations of self-driving cars derived from research in the HEAD project.
Through the life of the HEAD project we also got the opportunity to invest in the trust foundations of what has come to be a long-term research collaboration, both through developing our collaboration in practice but also through hiring two industry PhD-students employed by Volvo Cars and enrolled in PhD-education at Halmstad University. After the HEAD project we followed up with the TIC-project (Trust in Intelligent Cars), that included combined ethnographic research with so-called Wizard of Oz – experiments on test tracks and the ongoing RELEVANT project in which we are following families that are trying out new ways to charge their electric cars.
A Human Approach
However, the projects that really paved our way into the Active8-Planet are the two methodologically oriented projects AHA I and AHA II. AHA stands for ‘A Human Approach’ and both projects are part of the strategic project portfolio of Drive Sweden (one of Sweden’s government-funded strategic innovation programs). AHA I aimed at creating a collaborative research and design methodology for future urban mobility by aligning stakeholders from cities, public transport, car industry and academia through a people-centric approach. Ethnographic material from our previous projects was used to create a joint starting point in people’ everyday mobilities, nudging the different stakeholders into discussing people as ‘people’ and not primarily as ‘users’ or ‘citizens’ (which is usually the case in industry and cities respectively). Among other things, AHA I resulted in a series of workshops where stakeholders from the car industry, academia, city planning and public transport met, discussed and tried to solve each other’s issues and problems from people-centric real-life perspectives based in ethnographic research.
Photo 3: Stakeholders in the AHA I project from the cities of Gothenburg and Helsingborg, public transport, Volvo Cars and Halmstad University, workshopping how a future shared family shuttle could look like, based on real-life situations presented through ethnographic research. Photo: Patrik Palo
In the ongoing AHA II project, we have pushed the collaborative agenda even further to also engage people living in particular residential areas in co-design activities by establishing two Urban Living Labs in Gothenburg City and Helsingborg City in Sweden. Through a participatory design ethnographic approach, we are aiming at creating new concepts for future mobility that is not only based on ethnographic understandings of these areas, but that also engages the people who live there in designing and trying out the concepts. By doing this we are being able to scrutinize the taken for granted ideas of what should be developed and for whom and why, as well as come up with alternative ways of defining the driving forces for new mobility that are more aligned with what people already do, feel and value.
Engagement is key
Our experience is that one major struggle to create successful collaborations regards engagement. How do we create an engaging project culture with distributed and shared responsibilities across stakeholders? Especially when the different stakeholders are working along completely different agendas set by politicians on the one hand, and business interests on the other, with subsequent different mindsets regarding the people they interact with through their services. Are they ‘citizens’, and part of realising the city’s visions, or are they ‘users’, who should be provided with the right kind of vehicles and services to become ‘customers’? These different agendas need to be aligned to create the desired synergies. What we have found out is that by providing the project with a real life based understanding of ‘people as people’ can serve as the neutral common ground where different agendas and goals can be, at least partly, merged. The other key for overcoming difficulties that should not be forgotten is to work on the similarities and joint interests between the different stakeholders and not only continuously powerpointing each other with the company or city ‘grand narrative’ of purposes and goals to point out the differences. Or, for that matter, deliver ethnographic material in academic lingo without taking an active part in transforming the material into insights together with the other stakeholders. In AHA I, we did follow-up interviews after a particularly bad experience of talking over each other’s heads in one of our first workshops, and we identified a need to move the conversation out from facilitated workshops in meeting rooms into informal conversations in smaller blended groups of people working together on particular tasks. In Swedish, we sometimes talk about this as the ‘cinnamon bun – effect’, which refers to the Swedish ‘fika’ tradition. ‘Fika’ is our daily 10 o’clock ritual, making time for friends and colleagues to share a cup of coffee and maybe a cinnamon bun (Listen to the Fika Song!). Lessons learned from AHA I underlined the obvious fact that you need these types of informal ‘cinnamon-bun’ conversations to create teams, also in multi-stakeholder teams.
Infusing more collaborations
As said in the beginning, we are very happy to now take the highly relevant next step to also include students into this collaborative work through Active8-Planet, as well as exchanging ideas and learning together with other like-minded partners in the project! In this way, we will be able to provide students with collaborative experiences that they can bring with them, and hopefully also advocate for, in their coming professional life. At the same time, our already existing collaborations will be infused with new perspectives from a new stakeholder group; young people in the beginning of their career that really want to be part of a change toward more sustainable living from no other agenda than their own.