SANDPIT - 'Reflect': A feasibility study in experienced utility and travel behaviour

Travel behaviours have shown considerable resistance to change, but substantial change is needed because reduced emissions cannot be secured from technical innovation alone. Our focus is on a new way to engage with, and ultimately influence, travel behaviours. Instead of appealing to emission reduction (which can feel removed from our everyday experiences), we appeal to people's wish to improve their own subjective well-being (SWB). Drawing on the behavioural economics concept of experienced utility (EU) and the psychology of health behaviour change, we combine these perspectives with expertise from mobile computing, creative technologies, mathematics and user-centred design to explore an innovative solution to understanding and potentially influencing travel behaviour. We develop an experience sampling system via a smartphone platform for the collection and delivery of real-time information on subjective travel experience. In a series of small controlled trials we feedback information to individuals about their own experiences, and those of others, and we explore whether and how these interventions change behaviour. The idea is one of user-informed behavioural interventions to encourage self-motivated change, and here we draw on evidence from successful interventions in health.

Here is what it might look like. You wearily push the car door shut, run your fingers over the dent and trudge, head down, to your front door. Placing your keys on the table, a tired face stares back from the hallway mirror - how many more grey hairs? Slumped in your armchair about to switch on the TV, your smartphone buzzes. You know what it is. Those people at the REFLECT project always know when you've arrived home and now they want to know how you feel. You tap a few keys in response to their prompts and then settle back in the chair for a snooze. You dimly register the spattering of rain on the windowpanes. The sky darkens ... The phone buzzes and you jerk up - must have dozed off. It's bound to be the REFLECT project prompting you with a reminder to download a 'representation of your travel experience'. You'd been listening to them over the last week and they'd only made your mood worse. What have they got for me now? That's unusual, "they want me to try someone else's experience?" You press play, and there's a picture of someone reading on a bus, they look very chilled, ipod on, the background music is relaxing ... Next morning you wake to the twitter of birds and soft sunlight stealing through the shutters. That crick in your neck seems to have gone and it's stopped raining. Through half-closed eyes you think back through the events of last night. Intrigued by someone else's experience, you had looked at that person's profile on the REFLECT system. Whoever they were, they clearly lived nearby because they took the same route into the centre of town. Every day, the travel experience this person had reported was consistently more pleasant than yours. The only difference you could see was that they took the bus into town. You'd many times passed people waiting at the stops: "Mugs," you'd thought, feeling superior in the metallic enclosure of your car. "Yet, I really don't enjoy my travel experience and they clearly do." "I wonder...".

Our project aims to encourage people to reflect on how they feel during regular journeys. We are not promising that the interventions that we deliver in this feasibility study will promote beneficial change. However, we explore how they influence the way people think about their travel behaviour, and use this improved understanding to design interventions that will promote change.

The transport Grand Challenge aims to change travel behaviours to achieve reduced emissions. Our focus is on a new way to engage with these behaviours; instead of appealing to emission reduction, we appeal to people's desire to improve their own subjective wellbeing (SWB). Our proposition is that experienced utility, a form of SWB, measured at the point at which journeys are made, combined with interventions that feedback behaviour representations, can promote positive behavioural change, resulting in improved quality of life as well as reduced emissions.

Our impacts span policy (in transport and other contexts like energy use and health), the digital economy and the transport planning community. We have a good track-record of engagement with these groups, and we will use our Expert Advisory and Stakeholder Groups to develop these links, particularly with the DfT and the Cabinet Office's Behavioural Insights (or 'nudge') Team. We will engage with the wider Digital Economy community via the EPSRC Digital Economy programme and the e-Horizons research centre, and the relevant TSB Knowledge Transfer Networks. We will liaise with the established Transport Planning community via the Transportation Research Group (Southampton), and we will engage where appropriate with initiatives emerging from the Local Sustainable Transport Fund.

There are been a recent surge in policy interest in individual behaviour change. Our empirical investigation of experienced utility and SWB is a rare real-world investigation, informing the measurement of SWB and contributing to debates on how behavioural economics can be used to influence individual behaviours. This is particularly pertinent with the Prime Ministers recent announcement on measuring 'happiness', and emphasis on the 'nudge' philosophy.

The internet and mobile communications are two great innovations of the last 20 years, now combined in smartphone technology which will become widespread over the next 2-3 years. In this context the development of an open tool to collect transport experience data will benefit researchers studying transport behaviours. The system can offer significant advantages over existing approaches that are typically based on travel diaries or observational studies. Moreover, the addition of mechanisms to support the deployment of interventions can be reused in a wide range of contexts. The design of visual and sonic representations and the analysis of their effects on behaviour contributes to Human Computer Interface design, and the new discipline of Emotioneering, with applications in areas as diverse as computer games, virtual environments and cognitive therapy. As we move to a digital and virtual age, behavioural knowledge is invaluable not only to our economic wellbeing (e.g. developing new technology in the important computer games industry), but also to our social wellbeing through digital health therapies and treatments.

In user-centred design we inform three areas: (i) design of engaging, non-intrusive mobile capture of data relating to behaviour and experiences, supporting empirical work that depends on understanding users' real-life experience; (ii) representation of subjective 'experience' alongside objective 'behaviour' data.; (iii) assessment of the interventions will inform the potential for persuasive technologies to influence behaviours at an individual and 'community' level.

Developments in the analysis of social networks are hampered by a lack of real-world data. Our data will be of value to the mathematical Network Science community, increasing understanding of the modelling of social phenomena in contexts where interactions between individuals are important. The project exemplifies the application of mathematics to 'real-world' problems and provides ideal material to communicate the importance of maths to the public and inspiring school students to consider careers in STEM subjects with long-term economic benefits for the UK.