Wireless Keynote

The second keynote is by Nina Wakeford of INCITE at the University of Surrey. Her topic is "The Identity Politics of Mobility and Design Culture". She builds on queer theory and suggests that we might take from it the break with an understanding of identity as fixed - this then is directly relevant to studies of mobility, of course.

Mobile experience is usually either created (location-based games, etc.) or captured (surveillance of user movements and its analysis); neither of these movements are sufficiently theorised and questioned. We need both less and more of the term or trope mobility - less of the type which assumes that movement in place or space is about mobility. That kind of mobility is really more an encountering of infrastructure. We also need more mobility in terms of our theories; we need to make mobile theories more risky and interdisciplinary.

She notes Rheingold's work on smart mobs, which envisages wireless devices as engendering more interaction and collaboration, and sees that as a good thing. On the other hand, Sarah Jain suggests that the mobile phone could conjure an endless loop of homogenous lives. It's also important to note that mobility isn't a new term - sociologists have long used it to refer to social mobility.

Tim Cresswell has suggested that we have now moved from a sedentarist metaphysics to a nomadic metaphysics, which values mobility over all and perhaps has gone too far, and ought to be questioned. Nonetheless, mobility is largely seen as a good thing (community building, status, freedom, progress are all commonly associated with this - but what of this is sustainable?). Such general valuations of mobility tend to flatten difference, and posit us all as already mobile postmodern citizens.

Sarah Jain talks about 'mobility counterparts' and 'mobility providers'. Counterparts are things like drive-through counters, shopping centres, and taxis, which respond to individual mobility. Providers on the other hand are those who enable mobility in the first place - this also includes taxis and similar services, but in a different way...

Nina now recounts a project in which four teenage boys in London were provided with photo messaging phones and call credits, in order to study their mobile interactions. But what they did with the photo messaging phones was to create relatively immobile messages - the boys felt strange sending photos; rather they'd keep them in their phone and use them in direct face-to-face interaction. (They wanted to perform their photo materials.)

Another study focussed on women (many from Somalia) in a homeless mother and baby shelter, many of whom also had mobile phones and (through the house) Internet access. These were women 'in limbo' with very limited mobility (few of them even had baby carriages). Mobile technologies here were used to produce geographic, social, and familial stability, to reduce the feeling of being 'in limbo'.

Building on these experiences, then, Nina suggests what she calls inconvenience sampling for design - usually where mobile technologies are designed they are built on a convenience sample: they are designed for a group of people which is easily accessible to the designers themselves. Instead, Nina argues, they should look consciously to those which are anything but easily accessible - this then means a much more represenative or at least challenging design task.