Framing key concepts to design a human centered urban mobility system

Urban mobility poses some sustainability and design practice challenges. Mobility components such as vehicles, urban infrastructure, mobility services or other services delivered along a mobility experience are often designed separately. The performance of a global urban mobility system, at a city scale for instance, is therefore parceled out into components’ ones that are not integrated from the perspective of a user who interacts with them in a door-to-door journey. This paper starts with relating different perspectives of urban mobility including, in crescendo, the human in the production of a global design solution. Through the examination of design and transport literature as well as practical examples, the paper highlights complexity factors of urban mobility that challenges engineering design. A second contribution is to identify relevant design objects aiming at providing a language for designing urban mobility.