WHAT
A systemic design project investigating craftsmen’s daily struggle with mobility challenges when conducting assignments in the Car-Free Livability area in the inner-city Oslo. The City of Oslo has initiated ambitious plans of transforming the inner-city areas of Oslo to appealing and accessible urban areas, focusing on increased livability.

The City of Oslo has removed all of its near 800 public parking spots in the inner-city and transformed them to bicycle lanes and urban walking areas with city furniture to facilitate increased urban livability. The inner-city transformation can be seen as a system change that has changed the requirements for its subsystems, of which the craftsmen play an important part of.

The project has analyzed and identified possible system intervention points. These points have been utilized in the ideation of concepts for optimizing the mobility, cost-efficiency and CFLP transformation issues for craftsmen from various perspectives. The project aim has been to develop concepts that has a positive system impact for reaching both the subsystems, craftsmen’s and the main system, car-free livability goals.

Research question
What can be done to change the system and improve the conditions for craftsmen, taking on assignments within the Car-Free Livability Program area, being a pro-active part to the CFLP transition?

WHY
The Car-Free Livability transformation is an important transformation that showcases the magnitude and willingness to change larger system structures to become more sustainable and increase livability in Oslo. This transition and system change can function negatively on subsystems that are too rigid, both in mindset and structure. The project showcases systemic potential in the proposed concepts, offers the car-using craftsmen flexibility and alternative ways of conducting assignments in the CFLP area.

The main contribution of the project is that it sheds light on the systemic complexity and entanglement of systems revolving craftsmen’s mobility while conducting assignments in the CFLP area. The project has also addressed both craftsmen’s and the CFLP system goals through providing a concept that has potential to benefit both systems as well as having a strong ripple effect, appealing to other stakeholders as an interesting option to take a part in the CFLP transformation. I believe that this master’s project can function encouraging towards new innovations that can help design sustainable systems in the future.