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- Convenors:
-
Manuel Jung
(Technical University of Munich)
Michael Mögele (TU Munich)
Alexander Wentland (Technical University of Munich)
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- Chair:
-
Sophia Knopf
(School of Social Sciences and Technology, TU Munich)
- Format:
- Traditional Open Panel
- Location:
- NU-3A57
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 16 July, -
Time zone: Europe/Amsterdam
Short Abstract:
This panel brings together STS and mobility by asking about the role of STS in researching and engaging in mobility experimentation. How do experiments test society around new modes of transportation, how do test beds generate epistemic authority, and what is responsible mobility innovation?
Long Abstract:
STS is increasingly contributing to the academic debates on future mobility and involved in engaged science initiatives addressing mobility transformations. Test beds and living labs have become essential for mobility innovation strategies and transformation governance (Engels et al. 2019). The growing laborification of public spaces underlines the need for STS sensibilities regarding testing practices as instruments that reflect the mutual construction of knowledge and social orders. Experimental approaches promise to simultaneously test technology, societal responses, and regulatory frameworks to scale up successful configurations (Pfotenhauer et al. 2021). Empirical studies show how autonomous driving is related to the situatedness of the place and infrastructure (Ryghaug et al. 2022) and how experiments of autonomous vehicles explicitly test social interaction, raising questions about societal consequences (Marres 2020). Further, STS scholars reflected on responsible anticipation of the politics of mobility technologies like autonomous vehicles (Stilgoe and Mladenović 2022). At the same time, interventions that experiment with low-tech transformations, like parking space reduction, provoke considerable protest, considered representative responses to socio-technical change (Tironi 2020).
This panel aims to push further the reflection on the role of STS sensibilities in debates of future mobility experimentation. How do simulations, models, and representations of future mobility generate expertise and epistemic authority? How do situated infrastructures and innovation cultures stabilize experimentation with future mobility? How can we understand the envisioned scalability and impact of, on the one hand, experiments with technological solutions and, on the other hand, disruptions of social mobility practices? How can we make sense of responsible mobility innovation and contribute to learning for mobility governance? How can STS position itself between critical observation and making and doing mobility experimentation?
We invite both conceptual perspectives to investigate future mobility from an STS perspective and empirical studies on various kinds of experimentation on future mobility.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 16 July, 2024, -Paper short abstract:
Test beds and living labs are increasingly set up in public to achieve an urban mobility transition. This proliferation of experimentation as transformative instruments evokes STS reflection on consequential social and democratic reorderings.
Paper long abstract:
Experiments in cities have become a crucial instrument for innovation and climate policy, particularly in the sector of urban mobility. City governments appreciate this shift to experiments that draw on the idea of developing future mobility in a more inclusive and participatory way, resonating with longstanding calls from the STS community.
Low-tech living labs and test beds of autonomous driving co-exist and present diverse models for scalable solutions. This proliferation of exceptional, experimental spaces in the name of the need for socio-technical change stimulates STS reflections on: How is experimentation in multiple manifestations enacted as an instrument for a mobility transition vis-à-vis other measures? What are the consequential societal and democratic reorderings?
In the city of Munich, the municipality and a large mobility research consortium experiment comprehensively with several mobility visions. Street experiments rededicate parking space to public areas for leisure and make a different future of living areas tangible. At the same time, strong actors like the Technological University use their tech expertise to demonstrate that autonomous vehicles can maneuver in complex situations. Another project created a test bed for improving data collection of autonomous cars. The city aims to become a laboratory for future mobility and underscores this ambition with an exhibition of these experiments during the International Mobility Show Germany. In the sense of STS making and doing, the research on and with these experiments can account for the challenge of how STS can be an active part of these experiments and contribute to more responsible experimentation.
Paper short abstract:
The transition to electric mobility can be further understood by examining the role of electric racing leagues in facilitating technological and cultural development around EVs. FIA's Formula E and Extreme E present themselves as technological testbeds for EV technology and climate change awareness.
Paper long abstract:
The transition to electric vehicles (EVs) is being conceptualized as one of the three revolutions in automobility (Jaller et al. 2020). While national-level and consumer-level research has been conducted, the literature has neglected to consider the role of racing in both technological and cultural automotive developments. Numerous innovations in today's street cars were first tested on race tracks, and racing has been a brand-building exercise for automotive manufacturers for over a century. Automotive racing has a long history as an exclusive and masculinized sphere, whereas early electric vehicles were marketed to women as cleaner, quieter, and easier to operate, thus more suited to Victorian femininity (Ivory & Genus 2010; Scharff 1991). Environmentalism and eco-friendly behaviors have also been constructed as feminine, thus the emergence of environmentally-conscious racing leagues represents an interesting merging of two historically differently-gendered domains (Brough et al. 2016). In order to understand the full potential of the transition to EVs, it is crucial to study the large institutions actively trying to shape both the EVs' materiality and sociality. Formula E and Extreme E, both sanctioned by the largest motorsport governing body in the world, emerged with the goals of raising awareness about the changing climate, implementing public outreach and legacy programs in their racing locations, and creating a culture and commercial enterprise around the EV. The future envisioned by these racing leagues is not only worthy of exploration, but will form a critical part of the renegotiation of our practices of mobility.
Paper short abstract:
'Autonomy' promises independence: the reality for 'autonomous' vehicles is different. Drawing on 50 interviews with developers, researchers and other stakeholders, we explore the social and technological attachments that stakeholders see inside the vehicle, on the road and with the wider world.
Paper long abstract:
The ideal of the self-driving car replaces an error-prone human with an infallible, artificially intelligent driver. This narrative of autonomy promises liberation from the downsides of automobility, even if that means taking control away from autonomous, free-moving individuals. We look behind this narrative to understand the attachments that so-called ‘autonomous’ vehicles (AVs) are likely to have to the world. Drawing on 50 interviews with AV developers, researchers and other stakeholders, we explore the social and technological attachments that stakeholders see inside the vehicle, on the road and with the wider world. These range from software and hardware to the behaviours of other road users and the material, social and economic infrastructure that supports driving and self-driving. We describe how innovators understand, engage with or seek to escape from these attachments in three categories: ‘brute force’, which sees attachments as problems to be solved with more data, ‘solve the world one place at a time’, which sees attachments as limits on the technology’s reach, and ‘reduce the complexity of the space’, which sees attachments as solutions to the problems encountered by technology developers. Attachments that reduce complexity are likely to include progressive changes to the rules of the road to facilitate 'autonomous' mobility. Understanding attachments provides a powerful way to anticipate various possible constitutions for the technology.
Paper short abstract:
Through empirical research on e-micromobility we demonstrate how and why test beds combined with engaged approaches to data collection generate opportunities to build place-based capability in mobility transitions that can inform future low-carbon mobility innovation strategy making.
Paper long abstract:
Developing strategies to encourage or enforce reductions in mobility-related energy demand can provoke a range of national and place-based responses: from advocacy and enthusiastic support; to protest and critical push-back. We conducted empirical research that sought to ground, locate and explore these responses by engaging in mobility experimentation through: conducting surveys on attitudes to e-micromobility (3200 responses); creating 3 neighbourhood test beds for e-cargo bike adoption; and collecting qualitative data from participating households (47 households, 235 interviews) in 3 medium-sized, UK cities. Drawing on STS scholarship that responsibilises research and the debates it generates as “world-making” practice (Latour 1992), we highlight three conceptually-informed characteristics of our qualitative research design and their potential contribution to mobility innovation strategy. Firstly, our research aims prioritised place and lived experience with specific focus on eliciting i.) ideation about e-cargo bike use (before use); use experiences during a 4 week period; reflections and intentions regarding future mode use (end of trial). Secondly, recruitment processes and interviews were configured as occasions for ideating, reflecting on and practically engaging with e-cargo bike use as well as occasions for collecting data. Thirdly, interviewers purposefully acted as enablers of the trial experience, supporting participants to articulate, negotiate and where possible overcome personal, social, infrastructural, technical/mechanical and digital challenges. Our empirical findings demonstrate how this reflexive capability building approach to qualitative data collection generated opportunities for engaged pragmatist mobility innovation that when combined with a place-based approach, has potential to inform how we 'make and do' low-carbon mobility strategy.
Paper short abstract:
The paper intends to reflect on a mobility co-design procedure, at present experimented in Italian companies in order to make mobility planning more sensitive to gender differences in mobility practices.
Paper long abstract:
In Italy, mobility management for employees – known also as commute planning – is compulsory for local units of companies, if they are located in larger municipalities and if they have more than 100 employees. Such measure aims at forcing companies to contribute to sustainable mobility.
As part of GILL (Gendered Innovation Living Labs) Horizon Europe project, the authors of the present paper are developing a co-design procedure to be implemented as part of the mobility management for employees, in order for mobility managers, managers, more in general, and employees to become sensitive to, and take into account while planning, gender differences related to mobility practices.
The procedure consists in combining a mobility questionnaire with a codesign workshop based on personas elaborated from the data gathered through the questionnaire.
Following GILL's framework, such procedure is going to be experimented and tested in few companies through two iterations as a living lab (LL) (as LLs are intended by ENoLL – European Network of Living Labs).
Based on the work we are conducting, observed through auto-ethnography and through the ethnography of the discussions emerging in the course of the co-design workshops, the present paper intends to explore how a low-tech experiments of mobility planning intended as Living Lab, can be actually seen as experiments and of what.
In particular, we will focus on the role of personas, on the kind of representation of future mobility they allow and on the experimental device they allow to create, considered in terms of script.