Futures research

My research aims to study risks and possibilities associated with future autonomous mobilities, with a goal of informing strategy and shaping a more equitable future. Through focusing on security and narrative, it explores possible futures that are attentive to the needs and experiences of diverse groups of people, using a novel design thinking process. This futures-focused approach looks to address the harms and insecurities linked to current automobility systems by employing long-term thinking and foresight practices. The output of this research is expected to include a set of recommendations for shaping a fairer and more successful future at a variety of scales, and will seek to identify potential impediments.

The UK's National Cyber Security Centre notes that managing risk in an increasingly uncertain and complex world means we need new tools and strategies to reason about future uncertainties. This is crucial to keep people safe online. But it is also true more widely in an age of increasing technological change. But at present, much futures thinking is quite limited in scope, and constrained to large government and corporate entities. This means that a lot of work going into shaping futures offers a limited perspective on what the future could be given the similar backgrounds of people working on it, and hence we risk missing out on alternatives and instead extending the present—complete with all the inequalities and insecurities it contains—into the future. This represents a missed opportunity given the vast potential for change and opportunity in the future, if we merely stop to see that. Hence, research into more participatory ways of thinking about the future is important if we are to arrive at a future that truly addresses the big problems in society. Without this, a frequent focus on shorter-term predictions and foresight exercises centred on extending the status quo means taking away agency and possibility from people—both current and future generations—who occupy this future. Roman Krznaric equates this to treating the future as "a distant colonial outpost devoid of people", and calls for more long-term thinking in society.

There is a lot that's good about automobility. Cars offer us freedom, meaning, social mobility, and they are also impressive pieces of engineering. But alongside these benefits, there are harms. The obvious one is the violence of the automobility system. 1.3 million people are killed each year, and many more injured. They also have a significant climate impact (both in operation and upstream in production), they remain inaccessible to many people, and by designing society around cars over the last century, we've created a car-dependency that means alternatives like active travel and public transport are frequently overlooked—resulting in cities that are getting more congested and dominated by the car. Autonomous cars could solve many of these problems, but if they continue to be used as cars currently are, then cities may even become more congested, transport may remain inaccessible to large parts of society, and active travel might actually reduce—harming health and the planet. Yet many visions of future autonomous mobility strongly resemble the current system, with private cars used mainly by urban commuters and traditional nuclear families in the suburbs. If we want better cities and more accessible mobility options, this imaginary of autonomous mobility needs complicating.

What next?

My research aims to be participatory. I have engaged a wide range of groups in thinking about possibilities for autonomous mobility, ranging from industry, to government, to civil society. Given my research focus on diverse futures thinking and narrative, I've employed a range of methods to engage with, explore, and challenge possible futures. These are broadly collected under a design thinking process that begins by asking what possibilities for autonomous mobility exist at the moment—through conducting a series of interviews—before moving on to analyse and expand on the underlying scenarios, which are translated into a speculative story prototype that can be used to explore possibilities with people. This approach combines speculative and participatory elements alongside established futures methods in an effort to complicate and interrogate possible futures for autonomous mobility.