Background & need

Research on physical activity and health provides continuing, consistent, and increasingly specific evidence to support the importance of physical activity for public health. Inactivity is costly, socially, and economically. In contrast, cycling is healthy, community-building, and environmentally friendly.

Whilst health benefits of cycling have been demonstrated (e.g. Oja, 2011), it is far less clear, how we might encourage people to sustainably use the bicycle as a preferred mode of transportation for active travel to work and how one might design for a more active life course of citizens, leaving no one behind.

While existing evidence reinforces the current efforts to promote cycling as an important contributor for better population health (e.g. Bourne et al, 2018), more design intervention research is needed to build a solid knowledge base of how we might design for sustained behaviour change. As such, this project contributes towards the prevention of ill health and promotion of wellbeing – with health and environmental questions being systemically interlinked (e.g. Maier et al., 2022).

Aims

The overarching purpose of the project is the long-term vision to combine active people with sustainable infrastructure. The project postulates that there is a need to effect multi-level systems change (human and infrastructure) in order to create sustainable behaviour change. In other words, the aim is to design health behaviour change taking a whole systems approach.

The field lab study ground and scope of this project will primarily focus on people in the City of Glasgow, including Strathclyde University staff and students. The University has recently entered an agreement for unlimited and free access for staff and students to nextbike bicycles with stations in greater Glasgow – which can be seen as an intervention and provides a relevant and timely study ground.

The core scientific disciplines that are brought together in this project are design and behavioural (health) science, with application in this case at the intersection of health and mobility. Design is known for its strengths in iterative prototyping and participative approaches, e.g. co-design of stakeholder (community) engagement (e.g. Sanders and Stappers, 2008) with more recent application to health contexts (Patou et al., 2020). Core stakeholders will be users, staff and students, citizens, designers, behavioural – and health scientists urban planners, and policymakers. Behavioural (health) science is known for rigorous experimental evidence elicitation through theory (e.g. Michie et al., 2011).

Research questions & methodology

The overarching research questions addressed are:

• in what way might we encourage/enable more people to choose the bicycle as a mode of transportation?
• in what way might we use stories from ‘lived experiences’ as indicators for behaviour change?

To achieve this, the project follows the Design Research Methodology (Blessing and Chakrabarti, 2009) and rigorous empirical testing of behavioural theory (Cash 2020; Maier and Cash, 2022). The project unfolds in five stages:

1. Criteria, scope, segment target population
2. Descriptive study 1: collecting behavioural data (health and mobility) before
3. Prescriptive study:
   1. Designing intervention (Craig et al., 2008)
   2. Conducting exploratory feasibility study (target, control)
4. Descriptive study 2: Collecting behavioural data (health and mobility) after
5. Recommendations for potential scaling

Envisaged outcome

For research excellence, for design, the objectives of the study in designing for choosing the bicycle as preferred mode of transport encompasses both insights into behaviour change and choice modelling as well as designing of journey experiences. This will firstly be tested in both experimental settings, which advances the design field through research study rigour (Cash, 2020), and secondly narrative experience sampling (user stories through personas and journey mapping) tested with an industrial case application (nextbike intervention) which advances design practice, and thirdly the project’s envisaged outcomes include high-level recommendation for designers upstream, e.g. designing touchpoints on the journey, i.e. intersections, ease of station access, and decision-support for locations and station design. For research excellence for behavioural science, this project will bring a concrete application case with insights on sustaining behaviour change. The combined novelty lies in studying multi-level systems change: individual choice modelling and experience design with an infrastructural intervention. Publications will include two-three journal articles and two conference proceedings at the most prestigious international conferences at the intersection of design and behavioural science, including the ICED, DESIGN, and e.g. Transportation Research conference series.

Further information

Please note that applications will be considered on an on-going basis, as and when received, and therefore you are encouraged to make your application as soon as possible.