This blog post report on work-in-progress within the DfG course! The post is written by the group dealing with the brief on ‘Pilot project for Personal Budgeting Model’, provided by the Ministry of Social Affairs, Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare (THL), and the Social Insurance Institution of Finland (Kela) in collaboration with the ORSI project.
Group 1C: Eve Nieminen and Diana Becares Mas from the Creative Sustainability program, Esko-Matti Helin from Collaborative and Industrial Design program, and Faye from Human Computer Interaction Design program.
Group 1C was commissioned to work with the Ministry of Social Affairs pilot on personal budgeting and mobility services, which aims to improve the transportation services used by persons with disabilities. The focus of group 1C is to look into the needs of different user groups and to map out possible future service paths. Our group works in collaboration with Espoo, the city that leads the mobility pilot starting in Länsi-Uusimaa during Spring 2021.
The first two weeks of the course has given our group a lot to think about, and we have had our hands full with collecting background material and arranging interviews with different stakeholders to gain a more in-depth understanding of the current mobility service system. Our group is especially excited to have reached several people from the mobility pilot test group because the core goal of the project is to make the mobility support services as convenient as possible for the users.
A big challenge for the project will be to find ways how environmental sustainability and social sustainability can be combined in mobility support services. Currently, the users of these services take the majority of their trips by taxis, partly because the public transportation system doesn’t support accessible travel. Additionally, more remote locations like the suburbs of Lohja might lack public transportation altogether. Also, for some users, travel on public transport is not a viable option. However, one of the project’s aims is to increase the use of public transportation with the multimodal journey -model, where the idea is that the user would take the suitable parts of their journey by train or bus. Our group is intrigued to find out about the users’ thoughts and feelings regarding these multimodal journeys, and how they might best fit the users’ personal needs and goals.
Along with getting on board with the project brief, our group has tried to get to know each other better. In times like these, it hasn’t been possible to go for lunch or grab an after-work drink together, and it takes a bit more effort to make teamwork fun. Luckily the Spring weather should be just around the corner and taking a coffee break outside in the sun should be safe and sound. Remote or on-site, our group looks forward to the following weeks of research and the mid-term presentation, where we get to present our findings on mobility support services.
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