Innovative Bike-Sharing Design as a Research and Educational Platform for Promoting More Livable Urban Futures

Studying the viability of innovative urban access design is the key to achieve optimum results when attempting to transform dogmatism referring to conventional car-orientation into a meaningful driver of modal change that is founded on the actual societal needs for future transportation. An efficient public bicycle scheme could be the very definition of a solution that could encourage and even facilitate, to a certain extent, such a transition. This paper discusses how a post-graduate course embraced, through the means of a service-oriented design exercise, the potential introduction of such a system. More specifically, seven research teams, closely guided by the three authors, were affiliated with designing a new hypothetical bike-sharing scheme in the city of Gothenburg, Sweden. The paper reports on: a) the novel educational approach the tutors employed, b) the taught experiences that helped the students utilize their potential as learners but also as inventive designers, c) the research in terms of design results and d) the overall transition from solely serving the needs of automotive mobility in urban environments to creating a knowledge platform that actually illustrates an improved design-innovation process to tackle future urban demands and eventually have a real-life context impact on the city of Gothenburg.