Our module, titled Context is King, focused on urban mobility pilots, that is – situations in which cities are testing new mobility concepts, techniques or products to tackle one or several, a hybrid training programme focusing on building the capacities of city governments to engage with their citizens and other stakeholders on the sustainable mobility transition. We ran the course in 2023, 2024 and will follow up with a

While usually pilot testing of solutions and services is based on User Experience –focusing on the interactions between the solution and its users only–, our Citizen Engagement focus is concerned with the interactions beyond the user, with the impact of a specific solution or service on its users but also all the other inhabitants of the public space that the solution comes into. This is important because cities, public spaces, are complex environments where multiple perspectives coexist, and they are profoundly different from hypothetical scenarios or controlled environments where new products or services may have been tested before.

To dive into the above, we structured the module in two sessions: theory and practice. The theory session laid the foundation of what we understand as Citizen Engagement, presenting qualitative research methods to be used in a natural setting (the real world) to evaluate the implementation and use of a solution from a citizen perspective. Following this presentation, participants of the course gathered in Rotterdam for a three-hour practical workshop where they prepared and executed a hypothetical citizen engagement research, going out on the streets and interacting with inhabitants of the city. Showing the importance of using mixed methods and approaches was crucial, since “what people say, what people do, and what they say they do are entirely different things”, as Anthropologist Margaret Mead said.