The implementation of innovative technologies to support the planning and implementation of new transport schemes in cities requires staff to not only gain appropriate technical capabilities but also to have the willingness to adopt innovative technologies. Taking a sociotechnical approach, focussing on the Technology-Acceptance Model (TAM), we highlight employees’ distrust and unwillingness to become vulnerable as an additional challenge for Local Authorities (LAs) to cope with the introduction of new information and communication technologies (ICTs) for mobility solutions in their transport departments. Using data from semi-structured interviews and workshops held across Europe (conducted as part of H2020 CIVITAS SUITS), two key indicators have been identified relating to the unwillingness of potential users to adopt new technologies for mobility solutions, i.e., incongruence of values and attribution of negative motives. Furthermore, we show behavioral intentions’ that indicate that users’ are not willing to become vulnerable and thus, provide evidence of signs that an organization can look for that may show that the likelihood of their technological implementation failing is relatively high. The practical guidelines provided at the end of the paper have been derived from our experiences of introducing new technologies for mobility solutions in partner cities of the SUITS project and highlight how users’ can be persuaded to ‘become vulnerable’ and actual using new technologies for future mobility solutions.

Organizations increasingly rely on digital tools, such as social media, to harvest public opinion on a variety of issues ranging from brand reputations to political debates. One area in which digital tools have great potential is in consultation on design of public spaces. Public organizations are expected to consult with users of a public space before, during and after occupancy. Digital tools could increase the effectiveness of this consultation because: (i) they are available 24 h and do not rely on the presence of researchers and (ii) data are collected and analysed using automated methods, allowing faster decision-making. Despite these potential advantages, little is understood about how digital and non-digital consultations compare in practice. This paper reports on a live trial with a prototype digital consultation tool called VoiceYourView, which was co-designed with stakeholders and used to canvass opinion on the refurbishment of a major metropolitan library. Over 6 weeks, we used a variety of methods to collect comment from 600 users. VoiceYourView solicits opinion in unprompted form—it does not ask specific questions as in a survey—so users can say anything they like at any time. VoiceYourView carries out real-time analysis of data collected and uses public display screens to summarize comments-to-date in situ. Our research methods focused on observational studies conducted ‘in the wild’: this allowed us to capture user interactions with VoiceYourView in a realistic setting. Our findings indicate that VoiceYourView encouraged more positive feedback than non-digital methods. We also find that positive comments in general contain less actionable information than negative comments, and unprompted comments have similar actionable content to prompted comments. We suggest that this pattern in soliciting more (traditionally difficult to obtain) positive comments with VoiceYourView versus traditional survey methods implies that digital consultation tools of this type can complement existing channels.

This paper reports on VoiceYourView, a kind of intelligent kiosk, which uses speech recognition and natural language processing to gather the public's creative input on the public space designs. Over a six week period, VoiceYourView was deployed in a public space and 2000 design critiques were collected from 600 people. The paper shows that people are capable of providing creative input on their environment using unstructured speech or text and that a good proportion of these comments are actionable. The paper also investigates the use of public displays to auto-summarize comments left by the public so far. Although there is anecdotal evidence that this encourages participation, an experiment found that filtering comments (e.g., to display only positive responses) had no effect on what people had to say.

The sciences often find it difficult to present complex ideas to audiences in ways that are informative and interesting. This is problematic, when the public needs to enter into a debate about new ideas, during conferences when vast amounts of information on diverse subjects are presented in a very short time, and in lectures when experts present fundamental principles to novices. Given our relatively short attention spans, boredom thresholds and limited capacity to assimilate new information, it is essential that the medium is an effective conveyor of the message, and in itself helps the receiver to remain alert and focused whilst also presenting information in a clear and unambiguous manner. The development of a new area of research, cogent computing, provided an opportunity to produce an effective, animation-based information communication tool, in the form of an application scenario, to be used for communicating to students, wider audiences and the design and development team itself, technical aspects of pervasive computing

An essential characteristic of design communication is the need to talk about things (objects and concepts). We concern the development of a practical method to assist the iterative development of computer-mediated communication (CMC) systems that support talk by designers working co-operatively over distance. Previous approaches to the study of CMC systems limit the extent to which the value of new media and mechanisms can be explored. We have developed an alternative method to exploring CMCs based on shifts between communication resources during design activity, based on Scrivener's (2000) postulate that users in a communication environment satisfy their communication purposes by selecting from the available resources those most appropriate for their communication purpose. Such shifts reveal insights into the relative strengths and weaknesses of the communication channels. We outline the rationale behind shift analysis, provide examples of the analysis and conclude by reviewing the steps needed to use this method in iterative CMC development.