Visual Storytelling for Knowledge Sharing in Co-Design Workshops on Urban Air Mobility

Abstract

Realizing Urban Air Mobility as a transportation system requires cities to collaboratively plan uncertain futures with stakeholders who hold diverse expertise and priorities. Co-design workshops and simulations can support this, but the contextual reasoning emerging from discussions is typically lost to fragmented notes, creating a gap between what simulations show and what stakeholders know. This study explores an Interactive Storytelling Tool that combines drone traffic simulation with narrative video triggers to preserve and communicate stakeholder reasoning across workshops. Short narrative segments embedded in the simulation encode stakeholder insights from one workshop and replay them for subsequent regional groups. Tested across five workshops in four Swedish regions, findings suggest the approach helped surface domain challenges such as regulatory uncertainty and infrastructure ownership that simulation alone cannot capture. However, the study also revealed that groups at more advanced stages of UAM development tended toward solution-focused discussions, and that differences in regional UAM familiarity affected engagement with stories generated in previous workshops, pointing to the importance of workshop sequencing and facilitation in future iterations.