MSCA-COFUND-CLEAR-Doc - PhD Position #CD21-01 “Imagining the shared mobility of tomorrow: design and implementation of a methodological protocol for prospective ergonomics”

For some years now, we have been witnessing a hybridization of different modes of public and private transport, encouraged by the developments in the fields of digitalization and autonomous driving. Between trains, shuttles and shared taxis, the border between individual modes and public transport is less clear. New modes of transports appear. These upheavals are accompanied by new user experiences, which must now be discovered and invented to continue along the path of user-centred design.

These new scientific and industrial challenges require urgent attention: mobility technologies are evolving rapidly and the ideation and design methods that foster mobility visions and planning are still too poorly understood. They imply prospective research on future use and users, both from a conceptual and methodological point of view. Anticipating future needs and uses is therefore becoming a field of research in its own right which aims to grasp the full extent of the affective, cognitive, social and cultural relationships that people experience throughout their mobility experiences. This is a scientific challenge: to embark on a more forward-looking path by anticipating the needs and expectations of users who do not yet exist.

For less than ten years, prospective ergonomics has been interested in characterising the future in all areas of human life. It can be defined ""as a modality of ergonomic intervention that consists in anticipating future needs, uses and behaviours or in constructing future needs in order to create processes, products or services that are well adapted to them. "" (Brangier & Robert, 2014, p.4). The aim of this thesis will be to make a contribution to prospective ergonomics applied to shared mobility. The contributions of this thesis will be to propose innovation methods and concepts for the creation of an immersive and tangible experience of future mobility visions that do not yet exist. Innovation paths for services and products will be identified.

Scientific challenges:

Prospective ergonomics is a promising field, as evidenced by the special issue of the journal ""Le Travail Humain"" of 2014. Its methods remain to be constructed. Indeed, it is unusual for ergonomics, a discipline accustomed to studying real activity in situation, to predict future activity. The current proposals combine three types of analysis: on the one hand, the study of current uses by classical methods such as activity analysis (Leplat, 2000), with a view to proposing reference situations, on the other hand, the analysis of ""what might be"" future needs with methods of projection into future situations on the basis of scenarios co-constructed with public mobility providers (König & Grippenkoven, 2019), and, finally, the detailed analysis of the major trends (demographic, economic, social, cultural, political, technological) with the help of the various studies available. This combination has already been successfully applied to the study of dynamic carpooling (Allinc et al., 2018) and shared robot taxis (Hoarau & Cahour, 2021).

Issue:

This thesis aims to define an approach to anticipate future mobility needs in order to contribute to the field of prospective ergonomics from a conceptual and methodological point of view. How can future needs for shared mobility be identified and anticipated in order to guide innovation in this field? How are the resulting product and service proposals received by experts from the industrial world or likely future users?

Innovative character:

To our knowledge, very few theses have been devoted to prospective ergonomics in the dynamic evolving field of mobility. Prospective ergonomics has emerged very recently as a field of research, bringing together more and more researchers in ergonomics in France and offering a structural framework for the work carried out throughout the world on the anticipation of human needs.

Expected results and valorisation:

Using methods that he/she will have to identify, the PhD student will carry out an in-depth study of shared mobility practices, identify creative ideas for needs, uses and tools and finally, on the basis of this data, produce proposals for shared mobility services that will be confronted with different audiences (experts and users) to test their relevance with regard to human-centred criteria.

In terms of academic valorisation, the PhD student is expected to contribute to the writing of scientific publications.

Working approach, method:

The thesis will start with an analysis of existing work on shared mobility, prospective ergonomics, activity analysis, methods of projection into a future activity and more broadly methods of generating creative ideas and prospective in general (economy, society, demography, mobility...). This state of the art will enable the design of a methodological toolbox combining the three types of analysis mentioned above: analysis of current activity for the characterisation of reference situations, methods of projection into a future situation and major trends. This mix of methods has already proved its worth (Buisine et al., 2018; Nelson et al., 2014).

The thesis will also aim to test a global approach integrating these different methods and leading to the production of decision support materials, the different forms of which can be tested.

International mobility: 

The international mobility will be organized with DLR, Germany. For more information, contact the PhD thesis supervisor.