Sustainable urban mobility towards
climate-neutral cities
Funded by the Horizon EU program, ELABORATOR aims to use a holistic approach for planning, designing and implementing specific innovations and solutions towards safe, inclusive and sustainable urban mobility in 12 European cities.
Challenge
39 Organisations are taking part in the project, the aim was for everyone to work collaboratively across cities. Each city is designing their own solutions come with different levels of prior experience. However, it was crucial for everyone to walk through the process at the same pace, from discovery, trough to co-creation to the final implementation.
Expertise
- Service design
- UX ecosystem
- IxD/UI of the mobile & web applications
- Visual & brand identity
Team
- Product Design Owner & Lead for Product Experience Design Practice
- 2 Service Designers
- Visual & Interaction Designe
Project identity
We developed the project’s identity by exploring creative directions and translating early ideas into a clear visual concept. Through a collaborative voting process, partners selected a preferred logo direction, which we refined with a cohesive colour palette and visual guidelines.
The final identity was handed over for implementation across communication channels, including templates and materials. It was well received and widely appreciated by partners and the project coordinator.
Evaluation and Impact Framework
THINGS supported cities in defining the long-term impact of their solutions by providing guidance, methods, and input on selecting effective ways to collect data on social, environmental, and safety outcomes.
Through Theory of Change workshops, cities mapped their short-, medium-, and long-term impacts, identified key success measures, and selected relevant KPIs, while THINGS advised on suitable qualitative and quantitative data collection methods.
Collaboration enabler
As experts when it comes to collaboration and interaction THINGS contributed to a collaborative spirit across the project.
By preparing and facilitating powerful and engaging workshops, we showcased a way of using plenary meetings as opportunities for cities to collaborate, share, get input and inspiration. Besides the workshops for our own tasks, our team was very happy to consult and support others in preparing great workshops.
Feasibility and Action Planning
We supported cities in aligning urban innovations with stakeholder needs by guiding them from engagement strategies to need gap analyses and action plans.
Using our framework, cities defined user segments and actors including vulnerable road users and conducted surveys and participatory activities to gather insights. This helped refine solutions, with recommendations feeding into later development stages.
Twinning cities, sharing knowledge
With a knowledge-sharing twinning approach to improve long-term sustainability, facilitating replication, uptake, and capacity building between the cities, the Lighthouse and Followers cities will work together in a knowledge hub within the project duration and beyond.
Capacity building and knowledge exchange
At THINGS, we led knowledge exchange between cities by facilitating engaging and valuable interactive formats, supporting collaboration and capacity building.
We onboarded 10 Observer Cities and guided recruitment, outreach and onboarding. We organized workshops and online sessions to share methods and experiences in sustainable urban mobility, and developed a user friendly Knowledge Hub with toolkits, case studies and project insights.
Our results
- Visual identity for the project was created
- 22 cities were guided by us
- 15 online and in-person workshops were organized and facilitated with project partners
- 20 co-creation sessions with Milano users and Living Lab stakeholders
- 2 frameworks were created and implemented in cities
- 4 deliverables were created
- 1 concept of a product for urban accessibility planning was created and validated
Build accessibility into every step
Urban experience for Smart and Mercedes EQ
