Future Travel Foresight Catalyst: A Unique Approach to Exploring the Intersection of Transformative Technologies and Future Travel Behavior and Demand

Term Start:

September 1, 2023

Term End:

May 30, 2025

Budget:

$150,000

Keywords:

Artificial Intelligence, Future Travel, Futures Thinking

Thrust Area(s):

Data Modeling and Analytic Tools, Equity and Understanding User Needs

University Lead:

Arizona State University

Researcher(s):

Andrew Maynard

A growing number of advanced technologies — including AI, automation, robotics, spatial computing, quantum technologies, and more — have the potential to revolutionize future travel behavior and demand. However successfully navigating the intersection between travel, emerging technologies, and a changing society, will demand bold new ideas and insights. Building on and integrating with the work of the ASU Future of Being Human initiative, the Future Travel Foresight Catalyst project will utilize a blended model of research, engagement, thought leadership, and knowledge mobilization, to catalyze innovative and integrated thinking at scale around future travel behavior and demand. The project will combine futures methodologies with cutting edge use of media platforms such as podcasts, articles, videos, and more, to engage across diverse communities and stimulate new and transformative thinking around future travel behavior and demand.

The Future Travel Foresight Catalyst project explicitly responds to a growing recognition that siloed approaches to research, development, dissemination, learning/education, and engagement, are inadequate to ensure ground-breaking and responsive advances within increasingly complex sociotechnical ecosystems. These form a landscape that is dominated by fast moving innovation, radical entrepreneurship at the interstices between ideas and capabilities, rapidly shifting social norms and expectations, and governance and regulatory tools and frameworks that are struggling to play catchup with reality. To better understand the future of travel behavior and demand there is an urgent need for initiatives that intentionally blur the lines between research, development, and knowledge mobilization, in order to catalyze new thinking and ideas while revealing novel and potentially transforming pathways forward. Such initiatives need to be unconstrained by conventional disciplines, while facilitating knowledge discovery and mobilization within areas of expertise that are substantially enhanced through exposure to ideas from other areas.

By partnering with initiatives that include the ASU Future of Being Human initiative and the ASU Risk Innovation Nexus, and by drawing on leading expertise at the forefront of responsive and innovative knowledge mobilization, the Future Travel Foresight Catalyst project will uniquely extend understanding around the future of travel behavior and demand through exploring and expanding on emerging ideas across a number of public-facing platforms and modalities.

Deliverables from the project will include a foresight catalyst network within TBD and that extends to key external partners; public-facing knowledge mobilization media platforms; at least 10 public facing outputs.

Project scope

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