The current transition toward sustainable transportation encourages active mobility, such as walking and cycling. However, grouping cyclists and pedestrians under a single category of “vulnerable users” often overlooks their distinct safety needs. This study explores the specific mobility constraints and expectations of two vulnerable road user groups, visually impaired pedestrians and urban cyclists, to identify their safety needs in French urban settings. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 12 visually impaired pedestrians, 4 orientation and mobility instructors, 1 accessibility expert, and 43 urban cyclists. Interviews focused on mobility habits, infrastructure challenges, and user interactions. The thematic analysis reveals that the French urban environment fails to meet the safety needs of both groups of commuters. Four key issues emerge: the adoption of specific compensatory strategies to anticipate challenges, a persistent sense of insecurity, infrastructure misaligned with user realities, and difficult coexistence between vulnerable users. Visually impaired participants describe cyclists as silent threats, while cyclists see pedestrians as unpredictable. Cyclists and visually impaired pedestrians emphasize that the infrastructure disregarded their need to navigate safely. These findings allow us to formulate several recommendations. By contrasting the experiences of these two groups, the study underscores that French cities are not designed for active transportation modes yet. These insights will guide further studies, aiming to build inclusive and safe urban spaces for all.

Collective intelligence refers to a team’s general ability to perform well across a wide variety of tasks, a stable team-level analogue of individual intelligence. Although it fundamentally emerges from interaction, it is still largely treated as a static property or as an aggregate performance outcome. This article proposes a computational proof of concept that operationalizes a dynamic, process-oriented model of collective intelligence as a multilayer pipeline instantiated in immersive virtual reality. The model articulates three complementary views: collective intelligence as a measurable capacity (the C-factor), as an emergent state produced by three transactive subsystems, that is, shared processes through which teammates jointly manage memory (“who knows what”), attention (what the team focuses on), and reasoning (how goals are aligned), and as a performance gain over individual baselines, all embedded within a recursive Input-Mediator-Output-Input cycle. A multi-user VR collaborative task built on role interdependence and distributed information enables the synchronized capture of each participant’s multimodal behavioral traces (speech, gaze, facial expressions). These signals are transformed into windowed features and fused into subsystem-level indicators, whose recursive updates formalize collective intelligence as a temporally unfolding process rather than a fixed score. A pilot study (six triads) demonstrates the technical feasibility and user acceptability of the system, as well as meaningful variability in performance and interaction dynamics; higher-performing teams exhibit multimodal patterns consistent with more efficient attentional and regulatory coordination. This work bridges these perspectives within a unified computational framework and lays the groundwork for the longitudinal study of collective intelligence and for multimodal systems designed to support it.

This study examines how perceived situational factors shape the use of different transport modes. Moving beyond objective characteristics, it focuses on users’ subjective evaluations of travel attributes and the importance assigned to them. The study proposes an integrated, experience-based framework that structures perceived transport characteristics within an unified and mode-specific perspective, rather than treating them as isolated dimensions. Based on data from 517 French students, path analyses were conducted across four transport modes. Results show that determinants of usage are largely mode-specific, whereas satisfaction is more consistently explained by reliability, travel time, and perceived security. Flexibility emerges as a key driver of sustainable modes, while private car use is primarily associated with physical comfort and price. Satisfaction mediates the effects of several factors on usage for most modes, except rail transports. These findings highlight the importance of considering mode-specific perceived characteristics, reflecting how users subjectively evaluate transport options.

In this research, we investigated the role of multisensorial manipulation on creativity, and the influence of inspirational objects on creative outcomes. Object manipulation may support embodied cognition during a generative creative phase (emergence of motor, spatial, emotional ideas, etc.) then exploratory phase (creative fixation, development of a functional creation, etc.). Our protocol involved 136 engineering students divided into 34 groups which were provided with inspirational cubes illustrating manufacturing inventive principles or basic volumes from the Creative Mental Synthesis Task. They could manipulate these objects either in a visuo-haptic condition, or in a visuo-imaginative condition. Our results highlighted a main effect of manipulation, showing that visual-haptic condition led to higher creativity than visual-imaginative condition. We also observed several effects in favor of inspirational cubes with regard to basic volumes: significantly higher creativity, more subjective and inter-subjective facilitation behaviors, more cognitive and emotional operations. Participants also showed at an individual level a better mobilization of the multisensorial senses. Creative thinking may be stimulated when an active manipulation phase is set up before the creative production. This could contribute to improving practice for engineers, particularly for using additive manufacturing and/or during their training at school.

Managers’ transformational leadership was repeatedly shown to support trust, intrinsic motivation and competence of employees working with them. In contrast, there is a gap in the literature regarding employees’ leadership. In line with a self-determined view of competence management, we investigate the role of employees’ transformational leadership, work motivation and trust on the satisfaction of their own need for competence. We surveyed a sample of 71 field workers, holding non-managerial, non-executive positions in the industry. Descriptive data show their relatively high level of transformational leadership, and predictive analysis show its positive impact on their competence dynamics. Furthermore, identified motivation (and not intrinsic motivation) and trust towards managers also arise as significant drivers of satisfaction of the need for competence. Surprisingly, trust towards teammates acts as a barrier to individual competence, as if a trustworthy team would alleviate individuals’ responsibility or need to grow in competence. From these results, we discuss the potential of training transformational leadership in non-managerial populations: in addition to supporting employees’ efficiency at work, this could help them gain perspective and maturity on their professional role, increase their purpose- or value-driven identified motivation and support their competence development. Ultimately, all these factors are likely to enhance individual and organizational wellbeing, and thereby contribute to human and societal development.

The Proteus effect describes how users of virtual environments adjust their attitudes to match stereotypes associated with their avatar's appearance. While numerous studies have demonstrated this phenomenon's reliability, its underlying processes remain poorly understood. This work investigates deindividuation's hypothesized but unproven role within the Proteus effect. Deindividuated individuals tend to follow situational norms rather than personal ones. Therefore, together with high embodiment and identification processes, deindividuation may lead to a stronger Proteus effect. We present two experimental studies. First, we demonstrated the emergence of the Proteus effect in a real-world academic context: engineering students got better scores in a statistical task when embodying Albert Einstein's avatar compared to a control one. In the second study, we tested the role of deindividuation by manipulating participants' exposure to different identity cues during the task. While we could not find a significant effect of deindividuation on the participants' performance, our results highlight an unexpected pattern, with embodiment as a negative predictor and identification as a positive predictor of performance. These results open avenues for further research on the processes involved in the Proteus effect, particularly those focused on the relation between the avatar and the nature of the task to be performed. All supplemental materials are available at https://osf.io/au3wk/.

This study investigates the potential of serious games (SG) to enhance creativity in additive manufacturing (AM). While AM offers unique opportunities to explore complex designs, traditional manufacturing methods often limit designers’ creativity due to cognitive biases formed by years of using conventional processes. This research aims to introduce IdeAM, a SG designed to foster creativity in AM and help overcome these cognitive constraints. The IdeAM game was developed using the DICE framework (Define, Imagine, Create, Evaluate) with iterative feedback from both users and experts. The game immerses participants in creative scenarios through its content, rules, and aesthetic, encouraging the exploration of AM’s 4 key complexities as defined by Gibson: shape, hierarchical, functional, and material complexities. To evaluate its effectiveness, participants were divided into focus and control groups. The performance was assessed based on 3 aspects: creative solution generation, AM technical potential use, and participant experience. The results show that IdeAM significantly improved participants' creativity and their ability to explore AM’s technical potential. Additionally, participants reported higher motivation and engagement compared to the control group. The originality of this work lies in its novel integration of creativity in AM into a serious game, an area that has received limited attention in existing literature. The impact of this study extends to future SG initiatives in AM, with implications for both educational and industrial applications.

This position paper discusses the roles of Prospective Ergonomics to face the challenges of Anthropocene. In particular, we question the nature of human needs to distinguish between fundamental needs essential to human development and artificial needs partly responsible for overconsumption and detrimental effects on Earth system. An overview of theories of human needs across Psychology, Economics and Sociology contributes to clarifying which kind of needs should be supported in the future, and which kind of satisfiers (ways of actualising needs) should be designed in a sustainable perspective. Ethical implications and dilemmas for Prospective Ergonomics are also discussed.

By annually accommodating a growing number of students, higher education institutions contribute significantly to the daily flow of individuals. This flow exerts a significant impact on greenhouse gas emissions caused by transportation. Several studies have addressed promoting sustainable transportation at the individual level, while little attention has been drawn to examining the impact of organisations in this realm. This paper proposes a model of organisational influences on pro-environmental behaviours. Therefore, we thus identify a set of variables within organisations that expect to influence these behaviours. Among these variables, organisational culture appears as a major predictor. Organisational culture is a set of values, norms, beliefs, meanings and behaviours. Based on this definition, we propose to study organisational culture through measurable elements such as the organisation's values, norms and perceived practices. Additionally, we have identified variables directly influenced by organisational culture, such as leadership and organisational trust. Further variables, including personal norms and facilitating conditions, interact with the organisational culture and provide a more precise understanding of pro-environmental behaviours. This framework will be used to investigate student transportation behaviours. The results are expected to provide valuable insights for developing a culture of sustainable transportation at the organisational level.

Prospective Ergonomics requires building a vision of the future, which can be achieved empirically (e.g. analysing unmet needs) and/or creatively (e.g. creating future needs). We develop an alternative way of imagining the future, through a model-driven approach. Based on several developmental models, we provide a global picture of possible future(s) emphasising higher-ordered motivations and values (e.g. meaningfulness, accomplishment). To implement them, we then present a model of human accomplishment reinterpreting the concept of ikigai in light of selected psychological theories (e.g. self-determination, eudaemonic well-being, mindfulness). Finally, we apply it to an Industry 5.0 case study named ikigai robotics: we designed an equipment for railway maintenance following a double design process - a functional design loop and a motivational design loop. The process proved inspirational and the results both original and promising, opening avenues for Prospective Ergonomics to develop a new approach for designing the future.

Abstract Lead users are invaluable resources to generate user-centric radical innovation, but they remain difficult to detect and recruit in the general population. Lead userness, which draws both on the ability to identify unstated customer needs and find creative solutions to those needs, has been conceptualized as domain-dependent: this means that a lead user may generate innovation only in a specific domain for which they are an expert. In the present study, we aim to better understand the extent to which lead userness is a domain-dependent state (as elaborated in the literature) or a domain-independent trait. Following a questionnaire survey with 126 participants, we managed to reliably assess the empathetic side of lead userness (ability to identify needs) and showed that it was related both to domain-dependent characteristics (competences) and domain-independent trait (emotional intelligence). These results open up new avenues for implementing the lead user method in innovation projects.

Robots are playing an increasingly important role in very different professional and personal contexts, including that of railway maintenance, which is starting to integrate robotic tools. By confronting industrial robotics part of industry 4.0 and 5.0 with service robotics, we realize that the railway maintenance sector does not refer to industry as manufacturing, nor to service robotics as such but rather as a common space between these two branches of robotics. Our objective is to take advantage of these two types of robotics to introduce a new concept, ikigai robotics. This notion reveals and explores the symbiotic relationship between well-being at work and performance. We have conducted a study that specifically highlights the fact that the need for affiliation is a positive factor for both well-being at work and performance in the specific context of railway maintenance. Finally, we provide first guidelines for the design of ikigai robots and open a discussion on how to image this concept beyond our specific context.

The aim of this study was to measure the relative impact of culture and processes on innovation performance. Contrary to processes, culture represents all implicit factors influencing daily behaviour. Culture gathers the unwritten rules of the social game and serves as social cement for an organisation. Processes correspond to identified and formalised practices and rules, including having a dedicated team or qualified collaborators for running product design and development, for example. Based on the scientific literature, we designed a survey to assess these three sides of innovation (culture, processes and performance). We analysed the answers of 432 French innovation managers in order to identify the predictors of Innovation performance. The whole model appears highly explanatory and shows that innovation culture holds a predictive power nearly four times as high as innovation processes. In particular, eagerness for radical change, which is not so common in French organizations, is the strongest predictor of innovation performance. Collective discovery skills and innovation climate were also good predictors of innovation performance, whereas risk aversion and tradition appear as marginal negative predictors. . These results are original because practitioners and researchers mainly produce guidelines focused on innovation processes, methods and tools as if they were the only drivers of innovation. However, the major challenge for stimulating innovation could be to understand the organization’s culture and design processes that will be both congruent to the existing culture and likely to initiate a first step to cultural change, which remains long and uncertain.

Globalization and technological transformations emphasize the need for developing new skills and acting at the peak of one’s capacities. Competence is defined as the combination of external and individual resources to fulfill one’s job demands and contribute to the organization’s purpose. It corresponds to feeling effective and efficient in one’s actions. As such, competence is one of the basic psychological needs, according to self-determination theory. In this paper we focus on diagnosing the drivers of competence in order to implement transformations in a specific organization to improve the use of existing resources, stimulate the development of skills and increase performance. The study was conducted in a major French company from the energy sector. We re-analyzed the corpus of an annual survey gathering the perception of about 11,000 respondents representing all job categories and all hierarchical levels. We conducted a Principal Component Analysis followed by multiple regressions in order to identify the predictors of feeling competent. The first analysis shows that the data could be summarized in 5 key indicators: 1. Involvement and trust in the unit, 2. Team management, 3. Meaningfulness at work, 4. Working conditions, 5. Organization and cooperation. We observed that the item addressing the feeling of competence showed high correlation with the third dimension related to meaningfulness, which further highlights the importance of competence for self-accomplishment. The next step was to search for the drivers of feeling competent in several job categories. The results show that production and maintenance exhibit very different profiles. The only common driver appears to be the role of the manager in developing employee’s skills. For production employees, feeling competent is mainly linked to external resources (unit organization and social identification) whereas for maintenance employees, feeling competent rather depends on individual resources (work content, professional development). Beyond the design of custom interventions based on the specific needs of each job category, this study emphasizes that there is no unique solution for managing competence and that the key to performance and fulfilment should be found in careful analysis of the organization and its members.

Potential competing interests: No potential competing interests to

Because engaged employees work with passion, in deep connection with their company and are innovative, they may drive their organization’s performance. Teal organizations, which implement original and inspiring ways of working, appear particularly favourable to create and support engagement in the long run. The aim of this paper is twofold: first, to study engagement drivers and barriers among many organizational dimensions, and secondly to characterize Teal Organization through their practices. We also hypothesize that Teal practices may drive employees’ engagement. To this aim, we built a questionnaire and performed a cross-industry survey in France. The survey included a standardized measure of engagement, an assessment of organizational structure, management, leadership styles and social climate based on scholarly literature, and a series of questions dealing with Teal practices that we designed. The sample was composed of 767 respondents on behalf of their company. Using multiple regression analysis, we observe that engagement is predicted by social openness of the company and by organizational trust. Teal practices aggregate in a statistically reliable manner into a construct that we call Teal index. If Teal index is not a direct predictor of engagement, it appears to contribute to predicting trust, which itself predicts engagement. These results are insightful in many ways: they highlight trust as a key factor of engagement, offer a first overview of the adoption of Teal practices among French companies and open up avenues for capturing Teal philosophy beyond observable and measurable practices in everyday corporate life. These findings are discussed with an evolutionary viewpoint to better understand current and future transformation of organizations.