The Workshop and Beyond: Understanding Co-Design Practices in Mobility Service Development

Licentiatavhandling, 2026

Reducing private car dependence requires different mobility strategies to work together within better-connected transport systems. Shared mobility is increasingly integrated with public transport as part of wider multimodal transport systems, including through approaches such as Mobility as a Service. Developing mobility services within such systems is complex, involving evolving user needs, diverse stakeholder interests and responsibilities distributed across actors and levels of governance.

Against this background, co-design has been applied in mobility service development to involve users and other stakeholders in shaping mobility solutions. However, its application is not uniform and is largely documented through individual case studies that differ in scale, mobility problem, context, actors and intended outcomes. This limits comparison across cases and the accumulation of knowledge about co-design’s contribution to mobility service development.

This licentiate thesis addresses this problem through two studies: a literature review using a systematic search and review approach covering shared mobility and related mobility service development, and an empirical three-stage co-design process conducted in Fredrikstad, Norway, within the development of a shared mobility service involving citizens and multiple public and private stakeholders. The review provides a comparative understanding of heterogeneous co-design practices by examining their intended functions, participation arrangements and outcomes, while the empirical study provides an in-depth account of how co-design unfolds within one real-world process.

Bringing the studies together shifts attention from co-design as a set of methods and immediate outputs towards how participation is organised and how contributions develop over time. The thesis contributes an analytical understanding of co-design as a situated and evolving part of mobility service development, shaped by changing participation and project conditions and by what happens as outputs move beyond the collaborative setting into wider project and institutional contexts. This perspective provides implications for how co-design can be organised, connected to subsequent development and evaluated.