Choosing Mobility: A Graduate Thesis Exploring the Dynamics of Mobility Choice Making in Complex Urban Environments
Graduate Transportation Systems and Design at ArtCenter College of Design
Role:
Critical Thinking, Research, Data Analysis, Design Thinking
Date:
Jan 2023 - Apr 2025
Context
Choosing Mobility is a qualitative, multi-dimensional approach at understanding lived mobility experiences, allowing a nuanced exploration of thoughts, emotions, and actions related to transportation in complex urban environments like Los Angeles.
Rethinking Mobility
The project started with extensive research on the topic of mobility, and its impact on space and time. When we talk about mobility, it’s easy to reduce it to transportation modes like cars, trains, buses, infrastructure. But mobility is more than just the movement from point A to B. It’s a force that directly and indirectly shapes how people experience time, space, and social life in cities and suburbs.
My project takes a human-centered approach to understanding mobility. Rather than focusing only on systems and infrastructure, I looked at how mobility decisions influence everyday lived experiences, social interactions, and the spaces people inhabit. This perspective shifts mobility from being a purely technical problem to one deeply tied to the human experience.
Learning from the “Spatial Turn”
The “spatial turn” in social sciences was key to my research. Scholars like Edward Soja have shown how urban space is not just a backdrop, but an active force that shapes society. Los Angeles, described as a “post-metropolis” by Soja, became a critical case for understanding mobility’s role in fragmented, sprawling urban landscapes.
To understand these mobility complexities, I turned to ideas from sociology, transport geography, and urban studies. Thinkers like John Urry and Peter Adey argue that sociology has often overlooked mobility’s role in reshaping urban life, time, and everyday rhythms. Their work emphasizes using mobility as a lens to view society and its evolution.
Several texts grounded my perspective and gave me the language necessary to frame mobility in new ways. The New Mobilities Paradigm (Sheller and Urry), Mobilities (Urry), Mobility (Adey), The City and the Grassroots (Castells), Seeing Like a City (Amin and Thrift), Thirdspace (Soja), and Postmetropolis (Soja) are some works that helped me view mobility as a multidimensional phenomenon where infrastructure, society, and personal experience intersect.
Context Mapping
This thesis is situated at the intersection of behavioral science, transportation studies, and systems design, framed through the lens of user experience. Behavioral science, broadly understood as the study of human behavior and the factors influencing it, uses quantitative, qualitative, and mixed-method approaches to make sense of behavioral tendencies and interventions (for example, the Theory of Planned Behavior, Ajzen 2001) (See graphic below for reference).
Behavioral science frameworks indicate that social tendencies play a central role, and that pro-social orientations often lead to actions that benefit the collective, while pro-self orientations drive behavior oriented toward individual gain.
Transportation behavior studies draw directly from these frameworks, though they frequently rely on oversimplified interpretations of how social tendencies influence mobility decisions. These studies, in turn, inform systems design and policymaking, as mobility planners and decision-makers depend on behavioral insights to anticipate and shape usage patterns.
However, when these insights are borrowed uncritically or applied through outdated models, a gap emerges between the intended UX outcomes of systems and policies and the lived realities of users. It is this disconnect between the design of mobility systems and the actual user experience that my work intervenes.
Research Overview
Design Process
Design Brief
How might we uncover the socio-emotional dimensions of mobility choice making in complex urban environments?
Conversations and Visual Narratives: Facilitating dialogues about lived mobility experiences, allowing participants to express their emotions and thought processes using creative media.
To explore the nuanced socio-emotional dimensions of mobility, I screened and invited participants to engage in a creative process that translates lived experiences into visual and auditory forms. The process begins with experiential prompts - short narrative triggers designed to invoke emotions, memories, and reflections. From there, participants are guided through four steps that gradually unfold their lived experience, transforming an everyday mobility experience into a layered story of feelings, actions, and meanings.
The Choosing Mobility process consists of four steps:
Step 1: Storyboard
Participants first sketch a visual sequence of their experience. This serves as an anchor, helping them recall and organize significant moments as they move forward.
Step 2: Express Yourself
Through drawing, collage, or mixed media, participants give shape to their emotions and experiences, turning abstract feelings into tangible forms.
Step 3: Journey Threads
Using pins and strings, participants map out connections between their thoughts and actions, revealing patterns and tensions within the journey.
Step 4: Soundtrack
Finally, participants curate music that mirrors their emotions, layering sound onto the visual story for a fuller expression of their experience.
Participant Narratives
The outcomes of the workshop show how participants externalized their mobility experiences through creative methods. Each narrative combines visual, spatial, and auditory elements, providing insight into the socio-emotional dimensions of everyday travel. These experience artifacts function as qualitative data, revealing patterns of adaptation, stress, and resilience, while also highlighting the personal meanings participants assign to their mobility choices.
Although mobility research often acknowledges that decisions are influenced by more than rational factors such as efficiency or cost, these “unknown dimensions” are rarely examined in depth. This gap leaves emotional, social, and situational influences largely invisible within planning and design frameworks. The participant outcomes from this project directly address this absence by making such dimensions tangible, revealing how nuanced factors like stress, adaptation, and personal meaning actively shape mobility choices. In doing so, the project not only critiques the limits of current approaches but also offers a pathway for integrating lived, socio-emotional experiences into mobility research and practice.
The process developed through this project not only addresses current gaps in mobility research but also demonstrates potential for broader application. Beyond capturing socio-emotional dimensions of travel, it can serve as a tool for generating insights, deepening understanding of overlooked dynamics, and fostering personal reflection. Looking ahead, this approach could be extended to mobility planning, as well as to other domains of human experience.
