variable environment /
mobility, interaction city and crossovers

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Mobility? Mashup experience?

Mobile media, mobile (micro)-spaces, interactions.
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It is interesting to compare images from the early 60ies and 70ies to actual situations (see up). The "mobile city" was envisioned at that time as an architectural, utopian (and global) question that took into account that period's "new" techniques (car, trans-ocean flights, car-house/camping, motorways, etc.) These utopias proclaimed and promoted the fact that our way of leaving would change, would become less and less rooted to a specific area, less and less static along time. At that time, this was a prospective vision.
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But nowadays, "mobility" has become effective. So effective that the word is used for anything, from architecture to transport, from working habits to tourism, from technologies and media to social behaviors, etc. It has become effective thanks in part to those "good old techniques" (car, planes, etc.) and probably in a larger part thanks to "technologies" that were not existing in the 60ies: mobile media, mobile communication, mobile computing, networks. We can now work or entertain ourselves at any time, nearly anywhere in a kind of mashup experience where we mix the physical and the digital, the localized and the networked, the here and the there, etc.
This has an energetic cost of course and we are aware of it, it should be taken into account as a kind of sustainable design approach, but this is not the aim of our specific research project, we will therefore mostly follow other's research works on this subject.
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During this interval (60ies to years 2000), the question of mobility, that was envisoned has an architectural one, has moved to a transversal design and science question, where we don't really know anymore whose in charge of what. This should be mapped.
We've move from an "architectural utopia" to a "mish-mash" of (technological) objects, spaces and interfaces without really looking at the overall situation. It happened like an emerging phenomenon, mostly driven by technological and economical forces.
We've changed the scale of the products, their rythm of evolution so that nowadays the experience of "mobility" happens also with small or medium size environments (on the corner of a table with a laptop, on the cellphone in the street, while travelling with your small luggage, etc.). It usually has effects at a global scale though...

Posted by patrick keller at 11. 02. 2006 17:30