What is technology-forward culture and why does it matter to TransiT?

Dr Luciana Blaha is a Co-Investigator at TransiT and a specialist in how people interact with technology. We asked her about ‘technology-forward culture’ and why it’s important.

What’s your role at TransiT and what does this involve?

I’m part of TransiT’s Work Package 2, which looks at human factors, and my particular contribution to that is looking at how people interact with technology. For example, how users would interact with the digital twin interface we develop. This might be passengers using an app to help them figure out the best transport to use to reduce carbon emissions. Or it might be someone in an office using the digital twin interface to make a decision and seeing some options on their screen about what kind of transport users might be affected.

We’re also looking at how people are represented in systems. This is to make sure that, when we do our planning through digital twins, we’re taking into account as much as possible the effects on people from different backgrounds and locations. For instance, people with disabilities might not be able to transfer easily from one means of transport to another, so we need to take that into account.

What is ‘technology-forward culture’ and why is it important to TransiT?

Technology-forward culture is about helping organisations and their people adapt to and adopt new technologies. We don’t just want to put digital twins out there. We need to make it easy for people to actually use the digital twins. We want to make sure people can get value from them and have a positive experience interacting with them.

This is about the way we design interfaces, but also the way we build the organisational culture. For example, if a manager forces their employee to use a digital twin without giving them a chance to express their ideas or to have a say in how things are implemented, we might see some adoption problems there.

So the idea of building the culture is all about the communication around the digital twins. It’s really about how we integrate the technologies we’re proposing into a more positive work culture.

This might include developing workshops, for instance, to help people get exposure to digital twin technologies and to help them experiment with them. This could contribute to developing that positive work culture through knowledge, familiarisation and demystifying things.

What’s your background?

Human interaction with technology, from an organisational perspective, is my research specialism in my wider role at Heriot-Watt University, where I’m an Assistant Professor in the Marketing and Operations department.

I also lead the Intelligent Automation Systems Lab at the University. This focuses on the adoption of technologies, looking at automation, artificial intelligence and robotics from an organisational perspective. We explore how humans interact with these technologies and how we can make that interaction more positive, so that people are represented well.

I have a Bachelor of Arts Honours degree in Business Leadership & Human Resource Management from the University of Worcester and a Masters degree from the University of Aberdeen, where I also completed my PhD in Business Management and Intelligent Automation.

What do you hope to achieve at TransiT?

My goal is that we have human representation in the system, so when we visualise achieving our decarbonisation targets with digital twinning, we also have an idea of what that will mean for people.

It might involve changing transport modes, or increasing education in certain areas – or identifying areas where we need more policy intervention.

And the other priority is that we create approachable, easy-to-understand interfaces that make people feel involved – and motivated to contribute to decarbonisation.

Digital twins are virtual replicas of the physical world that allow systems and scenarios, including transport decarbonisation, to be tested much faster and more affordably than in real-world trials.