Title image that says Designing more inclusive journeys

Getting out and about is an important part of everyday life and key to our wellbeing, but our travel services continue to disable and disadvantage many people in many different ways.

Go Upstream brings them together with transport operators, service providers, policy makers, innovators and designers, creating new spaces to learn and work together, shaping design that can make our journeys more inclusive.

Building on our early research, we’ve created opportunities for people to use their experience of exclusion, expertise, creativity to find the best problems to solve and new ways to improve services for everyone.

And now, as we rush to decarbonise and redesign our vehicles, buildings and infrastructure, we need to ensure that those designs are lowering impact on people as well as planet - removing existing inequalities so that everyone will be be able travel in a low carbon world.

To do this we’ll need a new approach:

Title image that reads Designing more inclusive low carbon journeys. The words low carbon are inserted in a different colour as if handwritten.
 

The Scottish Government’s Just Transition commission highlights that “The major opportunity before us now, as we rebuild our broken transport system, is to deliver a decarbonised transport network that supports and promotes equality…”.

For many people, a decarbonised transport network that ‘supports and promotes equality’ will be one without the existing barriers and challenges that they encounter today.

To achieve this we’ll need to build inclusion into our designs for decarbonisation from the beginning, but the slow progress in making travel more inclusive so far tells us that we’ll need to do things differently. We need to think beyond transport and design entire journeys - a systemic approach with new tools and new design spaces that enable imagination and participation.

A venn diagram with two overlapping hand-drawn circles. On the left it reads Design for people. On the right it reads design for the planet. The overlapping space is called 'New conversations about inclusive decarbonisation'

And we’ll need a vision - if we don’t know what we want from our future journeys how can we begin to design them?

Decarbonising our mobility at the speed of inclusion

Between us we already have the collective knowledge, expertise and creativity to shape a more inclusive low carbon future, but we have to choose to do so - we have to intentionally design for inclusion while decarbonising.

We’re developing some ideas here that can help to make this happen:

Imagining more inclusive low carbon journeys

How can we build a future without a vision to work towards? We’ve developed a new opportunity for people to use their experience of exclusion, expertise, creativity and imagination.

By reviewing current decarbonisation plans, we’re imagining how they could be more inclusive and telling stories of more inclusive future journeys. Read more

Action plans for inclusive decarbonisation

Discover the different ways that people can be excluded from your service, identify opportunities to improve inclusion by removing these barriers and combine them with your existing work to reduce emissions.

By coordinating these efforts you can contribute to a truly Just Transition. Read more