Episode 9 of Conversations in the Park Podcast discusses in depth the role of citizens, through the city’s culture and technology adoption, and what’s the best approach from technology developers to make their projects successful in a society of diverse people.
Y-Mobility and the EIT Urban Mobility collaborated to invite guests that can offer their take on the subject.
Paddy Latorre, the head of strategic partnerships at Humanising Autonomy, a company which focuses on understanding the movement patterns and how to improve safety & efficiency by understanding the behaviour of people and vehicles. In her role, Paddy works to engage international partners and customers in achieving Humanising Autonomy’s mission to become the global standard for human interaction with automated systems.
Julianne Chen, our citizen engagement and programme Manager at EIT Urban Mobility. Julianne works with problems like citizen engagement and the interaction between end users, start-ups and big companies. The Citizen Engagement and Programme Manager is part of the City Club and Living Labs team and has a key role in development and design of citizen engagement activities, bringing cities and regions and EIT Urban Mobility partners together in interactions such as workshops, calls and webinars to collaborate.
Nick Reed, founder of Reed Mobility and as of recently Chief Road Safety Adviser at National Highways. With a psychology degree from the University of Cambridge followed by a DPhil and postdoctoral work in the Department of Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford and Head of Mobility R&D at the world’s largest automotive supplier, Nick created ReedMobility as an independent expert consultancy for future mobility topics.
The core of the conversation on the podcast episode, brings the question: How to incorporate and engage citizens’ perspective in mobility?
Our guests discuss the role of citizens as a part of the creation of new mobility, and how they connect with technology developers. The city’s perspectives and culture are based on people’s beliefs and desires. In order to bring any kind of new system (or adaptation of a current one), the new proposal has to embed their needs and views in order to be successful. Besides, it is critical to understand the people’s behaviour, and that it might change from region to region. Diversity creates more complexity, so to step up and be up to the challenge, our guests suggest we need to bring all the pieces of the puzzle together and give importance to citizen’s participation.
Julienne Chen maintains that there’s a lot of hidden complexity around behaviours, beliefs, desires and needs. That we need to understand diversity and at the same time collective vision. Paddy Latorre poses her focus on bringing a friendly user experience to citizens and she explains how accurate the understanding of people’s behaviour must be in order to push the adoption of new technologies. Nick Reed proposes that meeting people’s expectations when providing a mobility system cannot rely on technology developers only. Their strategy must include input from all parties affected by the product.
And they go much deeper into the topic during the podcast episode, which we were proud to sponsor. You can hear the full discussion on Spotify and Apple Podcasts, as well as anywhere else you find your podcast.
On this ocassion, we wanted to focus on Citizens’ role in Mobility
Watch our last podcast below!:
Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-citizens-role-in-mobility/id1546360284?i=1000544261323
