Topic outline

  • Swiss Federal Railway

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    • SWISS FEDERAL RAILWAYS: The project aimed at identifying far-future mobility needs of the working population.


  • About

    • The project was funded by the Swiss Federal Railway (SFR) research foundation as a study on the future of mobility in the transportation sector. The project involved four public Flash Fiction writing creative workshops, in which 84 citizens who were interested in the topic participated. The participants were asked to write three Flash Fiction stories set in 2057 and to imagine transportation of the future working population both for work and leisure.


      The chosen methodological approach to use Flash Fiction stories for data collection takes up the invitation by Sparkes and Smith (2008) to develop further methods of narrative inquiry and other forms of inviting stories and gathering data than the usual interviews (Wolf et al., 2018). Applying the Flash Fiction method in this case allowed the company to access 235 different far-future stories imagined by customers. To extract scenarios, qualitative content analysis was conducted, in which the transcripts of the stories were first openly coded, then the meanings of these first-level codes were negotiated and pattern codes created (Miles et al., 2014). The first level codes allowed to cluster the stories into four distinct scenarios at the level of the pattern codes, such as “type of work”. These stories range from eutopian (positive) to dystopian (negative) and utopian (just society).


      Europian scenarios:


      1.       Self-determined work: Humans work self-organised on creative assignments while robots take over routine tasks. People live at their favourite places and almost exclusively travel for social purposes (e.g., meeting friends); most work meetings happen in a virtual environment.


      2.       Mobile Living: Mobility determines the rhythm of life, both professionally and socially. Life is not tied to a certain place and people live and work in mobile boxes that move from place to place. Several stories describe societies without individual property.


      Dystopian scenario:


      3.       Surveillance: Work is assigned online by some form of central authority. Workers are constantly online, monitored, and dependent on digital support. They travel only to work meetings that are obligatory and planned by the central authority.


      Utopian scenario:


      4.       Emancipation: Humans resist a life dependent from digital tools and drop out of the mainstream society. They live in small rural communities and engage in craftsmanship and agriculture. Mobility is local – these individuals walk or use their bicycles.


  • Impact

    • The four different scenarios provided the company with suggestions that were taken up at that time performed strategy-making process (Wolf et al., 2022). These concerned mainly the development of offerings that matched the far-future desires of the consumer groups in the different scenarios.


       


      Further, several general recommendations could be drawn for the sector (Wolf et al., 2018): First, mobility providers should strategically participate in projects or consortia where mobile living and working environments are developed. Second, mobility providers should assess customer needs more specifically and therefore address their needs for speed, efficiency and privacy, well-being, and communication with others while travelling. Third, mobility providers should try to understand the motives of different customer groups that might not have mainstream needs, and those should also be taken into consideration when developing new offers. Finally, given the general desire in all scenarios for seamless mobility from A to B, there will be a need for a mobility integrator in the future. This integrator will fulfil the task of providing a single point of contact between different transportation services (e.g., municipal bus operators, regional railway companies, international airlines) and their customers.


  • Resources

    • ●        Miles, M.B., Huberman, A.M., & Saldana, J. (2014). Qualitative data analysis. A methods sourcebook (3rd ed.). Sage.

      ●        Wolf, P., Klotz, U., & Baumann, S. (2018). What can we do for you? Far-future mobility-related customer needs. In 19th International CINet Conference: Continuous Innovation: Spinning Out and Spinning in (pp. 447-456).

      ●        Wolf, P., Linden, E., Wittmer, A., & Klotz, U. (2022). Enhancing scenario originality: A conceptual framework for leveraging self-transcending knowledge in scenario development. Long Range Planning.

      ●        Sparkes, A. C., & Smith, B. (2008). Narrative constructionist inquiry. Handbook of constructionist research, 1999, 295-314.

       

      METHODS:

      ●        Ciolfi, L., & Lockley, E. (2019). Exploring flash fiction for the collaborative interpretation of qualitative data. In Proceedings of 17th European Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work. European Society for Socially Embedded Technologies (EUSSET).