Design challenges in motivating change for sustainable urban mobility

In recent years, the design and deployment of persuasive interventions for inducing sustainable urban mobility behaviors has become a very active research field, leveraging on the pervasive usage of social media and mobile apps by citizens in their daily life. Several challenges in designing and assessing motivational features for effective and long-lasting behavior change in this area have also been identified, such as the focus of most solutions on targeting and prescribing individual (versus collective) mobility choices, as well as a general lack of large-scale evaluations on the impact of these solutions on citizens’ life. This paper reports lessons learnt from three parallel and complementary user studies, where motivational features for sustainable urban mobility, including social influence strategies delivered through social media, were prototyped, tested and refined. By reflecting on our results and design experiences so far, we aim to provide better guidance for future development of more effective solutions supporting citizens’ adoption of sustainable mobility behaviors in urban settings.