Sponsor: RCUK Digital Economy
Principal Investigator: Dr. Janet Dickinson

Project Description:

6th Sense Transport investigates the feasibility of a social, spatial and temporal synthesis offered through locative media interventions, which situates users in a networked moment to make visible those transport sharing opportunities which have the capacity to reduce the number of fossil fuelled trips and associated carbon emissions while simultaneously influencing health-related quality of life measures.

The 6th Sense research vision is to understand the extent to which behavioural change in transport habits and practices can be facilitated through the creation of a new form of ‘transport network’, based on extending social networking principles to transport users and their individual vehicles. Underpinned by relevant models and theories about behaviour change and assisted by technology, it will develop and encourage acceptance of an innovative, open, extensible technical platform called 6th Sense Transport (6ST), providing users from different time ‘typologies’ with new ways of understanding the relationships between their own future transport plans and those of others.

The novelty and adventure of the research lie in:

• exploring the interplay between society’s multiple temporalities and time scheduling (e.g. fluid’ vs ‘fixed’), users’ decision-making processes and technologies in the transport domain to enable the creation of entirely new forms of less carbon intensive transport behaviours;
• considering how already tagged personal vehicles can become part of the “internet of things” and create new knowledge and understanding;
• developing new and adapting existing leading edge data capture, mining and dissemination techniques developed in other projects (TOTUM, OURTRAVEL).

For further information about the project, please visit the project website: http://www.sixthsensetransport.com/.