Going Car-free: Investigating Mobility Practice Transformations and the Role of ICT

: With the debates on climate change and sustainability, a reduction of the share of cars in the modal split has become increasingly prevalent in both public and academic discourse. Besides some motivational approaches, there is a lack of ICT artifacts that successfully raise the ability of consumers to adopt sustainable mobility patterns. To further understand the requirements and the design of these artifacts within everyday mobility adopted a practice-lens. This lens is helpful to get a broader perspective on the use of ICT artifacts along consumers’ transformational journey towards sustainable mobility practices. Based on 12 retrospective interviews with car-free mobility consumers, we argue that artifacts should not be viewed as ’magic-bullet’ solutions but should accompany the complex transformation of practices in multifaceted ways. Moreover, we highlight in particular the difficulties of appropriating shared infrastructures and aligning own practices with them. This opens up a design space to provide more support for these kinds of material-interactions, to provide access to consumption infrastructures and make them usable, rather than leaving consumers alone with increased motivation.