Lessons learned on the design of several tools for participation on foot

Abstract

The classical participation approach in mobility research and urban planning in Germany involves panels, discussions and workshops. Those are mainly targeted towards local residents of urban districts and typically have a homogeneous, older audience. A big part of the relevant demographic cannot be reached using these participation instruments. Additionally, in contrast to car or even bike traffic, pedestrians are not very well covered in mobility research. The conventional instruments of urban planning are not suitable for the evaluation of the requirements and problems of pedestrians in urban spaces. We tackled these different problems and implemented a user-centered and in-situ participation approach for pedestrians, using a mobile application and a web app to engage pedestrians while walking. In this paper we report on our concept and its implementation as well as lessons learned from our field trial.