Modelo para promoção da mobilidade urbana ativa por bicicleta: uma abordagem do design de serviços para o comportamento sustentável. (Model for promoting active urban mobility by bicycle: a service design approach for sustainable behaviour)

Doctoral thesis, 2019

The population growth associated with an accelerated urbanization process - with more than 50% global people living in cities - are weighting negatively on social and ambiental developing aspects. Among the compromised areas is the urban mobility, where the priority has been given to motorized ways of transports other than active mobility. Moreover, these problems are exacerbated at places where many people attend simultaneously such as shopping centers, schools and universities. As long as it is possible to understand the design as a requisite for promoting more sustainable lifestyles and improving the quality of life, connecting and integrating useful knowledge and applying them to solve real problems, the research question that arise is: How to use design strategies to promote active and sustainable urban mobility by bicycle at universities? Henceforth, a perspective about the engagement of design as agent for sustainable development is presented and, existent design strategies on sustainable behavior and service design were used to develop a model to promote active and sustainable mobility by bicycle at universities. The chosen research method to achieve the goal was the Action Design Research (ADR) in four phases: 1) problem formulation; 2) building, intervention and evaluation; 3) reflection and learning and 4) formalization of learning. The ADR enabled solving the presented problem in a practical way, making a model artifact as result, besides the theoretical contributions. On the problem formulation (1) phase data collection was carried out through literature review and systematic literature review, as well as an analysis of the mobility at UFPR in Curitiba and also the mapping and analysis of similar artifacts. From this phase some model's requirements emerged, as well as some research gaps. The phases building, intervention and evaluation (2) and reflection and learning (3) were the main cycle for the better solution for the presented problem through model development and iteration. The preliminary model solution applied strategies of Service Design and Design for Sustainable Behavior (DfSB) aiming to promote change of travel behavior of the participants. To verify the effectiveness of the model in its various aspects (adoption of design strategies, application in the university community, promotion of behavior change, satisfaction of participants and dissemination of results), the field phase of the research used as strategies of data collection: questionnaires, interviews, focus group, mobile ethnography and cultural probes. After five refinement iteration cycles, the last version of the proposed model was considered a satisfactory solution for the presented problem, as it was validated as the effective application of the Service Design and DfSB strategies to which, according to the data obtained, promoted changes in habits and behaviors among the participants. Afterwards, the final considerations regarding the goals, research method and suggestions for future work were described.