Mobilities, design and passenger experiences

Abstract

This special issue showcases new and emerging research at the intersection of mobility studies and design, examining how transport infrastructures, environments and embodied mobile practices are shaped and ‘designed’ by a whole host of experts, professions and politicians for different purposes. In this introductory article we provide an overview of transport and mobility design, opening with a discussion of the long-standing importance of design to the history of infrastructural provision. We outline the important contribution that mobility studies approaches can make to the study of transport design, highlighting the role of qualitative and mobile methods, sociological and philosophical analyses of passenger subjectivities, and of politically sensitive approaches to the design of mobility infrastructures. We examine how passengers possess different bodily capacities and abilities which may lead them to be included or excluded, have access to services or not. In the final section we introduce the seven articles comprising the special issue.