Welcome to MoSt
What is data storytelling, and why does it matter for mobility decisions?
If you're a mobility practitioner — transport planner, policy analyst, urbanist — you already have the data. The hard part is turning it into something a busy decision-maker can act on in five minutes. This is what MoSt teaches.
A data story is four things at once
Drop any one pillar and you lose the story. A spreadsheet on its own is just data. A chart without words is open to misreading. A wall of text without numbers is just opinion. And without interaction, the audience can't probe their own follow-up questions — they have to come back to you.
Data
The raw evidence — usually a few well-chosen numbers, not a spreadsheet dump.
Visualization
The chart, map, or table that makes the pattern readable in seconds.
Narration
The framing — what the audience should take from this and what to do next.
Interaction
The controls that let the audience answer their own follow-up questions.
Why this matters
Mobility decisions — bike lane funding, transit route changes, EV subsidy levels, congestion-charge zones — get made on calendar cycles that don't wait for the perfect dataset. If your data story doesn't help the decision-maker decide, the decision gets made anyway. Just without your evidence in the room.
The seven MoSt modules teach you to produce a data story that is decision-oriented (not just descriptive), audience-fit (not just technically correct), and quality-assessed (not just shipped).
How MoSt works
Seven short modules and one running example: a cycling-infrastructure decision facing a mid-sized German city. Each module starts with the concept (what it is, why it matters, where it fits), then a short practice task you can do in 5–10 minutes.
- Defining the Core QuestionTurn a vague topic into a decision-driving question.
- Selecting the Right DataPick the data that answers the question, not the data that exists.
- Visualizing for DecisionsChoose the chart that makes the answer obvious in 5 seconds.
- Adapting to Your AudienceMatch language and depth to who's actually reading.
- Building the Narrative ArcSetup → tension → resolution. Every story needs all three.
- Adding InteractionLet the audience explore your chart's follow-up questions themselves.
- IntegrationAssemble everything and self-assess against the MobiDaS quality requirements.
About the research base
MoSt operationalizes findings from two mobility-data research projects at TU Ilmenau:
- MobiDaS (Mobility Data Stories) — defines the seven quality requirements (R1–R7) that you'll self-assess your story against in Module 7.
- MODAS — provides complementary findings on decision-oriented mobility communication. External link to MODAS
The instructional design — concept-first, explain-then-practice, persistent progress — draws on Cognitive Load Theory (Sweller) and Situated Learning.
About MoSt itself
MoSt — short for Mobility Storytelling tutorial — is the instructional artifact developed as part of Nazia Afsan Mowmita's master's thesis at TU Ilmenau (Media Technology, supervised by Prof. Dr. Hirth). It is not the same thing as MobiDaS or MODAS, which are the research projects whose findings MoSt translates into practice.