Stimulating usage problem generation: An urban mobility case study.

Summary Designers improve urban mobility solutions by investigating archetypal usage problems in existing mobility systems. User-centred design methods help accomplish this task, but lack effectiveness when not supported by appropriate tools. Here we posit that the use of a traveller-centred stimulus improves the effectiveness of travel problem generation. To test this hypothesis, an experiment is conducted with two control groups as a baseline for non-stimulated problem generation and two experimental groups that are provided with a traveller-centred stimulus. The two sets of groups are composed of one group of urban mobility experts and one group of non-experts. Results show that stimulated groups generate novel ideas with a greater variety covering most of the traveller experience dimensions than non-stimulated groups.