Understanding user representations, a new development path for supporting Smart City policy: Evaluation of the electric car use in Lorraine Region

Abstract

Today electric car and Smart Grid are potential elements of any 'Smart City' initiative. According to several recent studies, French citizens are ready to purchase an electric car. Despite of these positive figures, sales of the electric cars are not really taking-off, but slightly increasing. Although, previous studies have identified motivation and barriers for the diffusion of electric cars (EC), we hypothesise, that the analysis of the a priori knowledge of the actors, in particular the users, can be enriched and it will provide a new understanding of the spread of EC. However, there is no studies explaining the types of representations people have of the EC, particularly for non-users, in order to have a better consideration of individuals, not so much as consumers or users, but rather as citizens. Thus, this paper explores the determining factors that determine how social groups perceive the emerging technology of EC and thus provide elements about a potential acceptability enabling its dissemination. In order to achieve this, this paper proposes a new approach based on the use of the AttrakDiff-2 questionnaire, a specific User eXperience (UX) method. This method assesses four different but complementary aspects of the social representation: the possibility of action of the subject on the system; the stimulation, caused, by the system; how the user will identify with the system and, the overall attraction. Data about the social representations of electric car for 131 potential users in the Lorraine Region of France were collected and analysed. Results show that there are differences of user representation regarding the socio-demographic variables. The proposed approach will provide relevant inputs to the infrastructure network design and Smart City policy decision makers.

Understanding Smart Cities: Innovation ecosystems, technological advancements, and societal challenges

“…The remaining papers (i.e. nineteen) can be grouped into four clusters labeled as follows: business models for smart cities (Abbate et al, 2018;Brock et al, 2018;Schiavone et al, 2018;Van den Buuse and Kolk, 2018); applications to tackle specific smart cities challenges (Amer et al, 2018;Grimaldi et al, 2018;Hopkins and McKay, 2018;Lex et al, 2018;Moustaka et al, 2018;Tanguy and Kumar, 2018); actions and roles of stakeholders of the smart cities triple/quadruple helix (Ardito et al, 2018;Corsini et al, 2018;Dupont et al, 2018;Engelbert et al, 2018;Lindkvist et al, 2018;Van der Graaf and Ballon, 2018); policies for smart cities (Caragliu and Del Bo, 2018;Contreras and Platania, 2018;Hamidi et al, 2018). Concerning the first cluster -business models for smart cities - Abbate et al (2018) explore the activities and strategic goals of twentyone small and medium enterprises (SMEs) operating in eight different European countries that took part to FrontierCities, one of the nine FIWARE (Future Internet-ware) Accelerators focused on smart cities.…”

“…Through such a differentiation, they figure out why the majority of the smart cities initiatives tend to exclude the needs and interests of citizens. Still focusing on the role of citizens, Dupont et al (2018) investigate the user representations French citizens in the Lorrain Region have when they confront with specific technologies like electric cars. Four complementary aspects characterize the social representation: the possibility of action of the subject on the system, the stimuli caused by the system, how the user will identify with the system, as well as the overall attraction.…”

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The Urban Car Body Design for “Energy Efficient Car Contest 2019” using Quality Function Deployment

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