New Mobility Articles

i) The Feature has a new article called 'The Sociology of Interfaces' which discusses how local culture plays a key role in determining mobile interfaces.

ii) Howard Rheingold has an article - also at The Feature - called 'Smartmobbing Urban Catastrophe' which talks about how mobile infrastructures can help in disaster relief and recovery.

ii) 'TRACE' is a collaborative project, by artist Alison Sant and programmer Ryan Shaw, that examines the layering of physical space with the on and off zones of the wireless network.

"The project seeks to blend the corporeal experience of the city with the invisible qualities of the network, creating a narrative mapping of the hybrid space between them. This mapping is one that challenges purely static notions of public space to promote a temporal logic of the city that reflects the fluctuating character of the wireless network".

Further - Digital networks and wireless technologies are radically reforming the contemporary notions of urban place. As network technologies move away from their hardwired roots, they are activating an urban dynamic that is no longer based on referencing static landmarks, but on a notion of the city in which spatial references become events. These developments imply a changing pattern of urban reference in which invisible boundaries of connectivity alternately thicken or marginalize the urban territories they overlay.


iv) Actively Mobile: Jennifer Bove's thesis project xplores the changing role of the mobile phone as a personal device, and how it could be adapted to better fit an active context.

Actively Mobile is a small disc worn on the wrist, arm or hip of those engaged in physical exercise. Incorporating the functionality only available currently by carrying several devices, it offers facilities and services such as a heart-rate monitor, an MP3 player, a mobile phone, a GPS locator, time and speed tracking, etc.

Among the services offered by the device: Buddy Run allows two or more people, running together but in different places, to share conversation and their current performance (to hear each other's pace for example); Actively Mobile trainer can help those training for a race to plan their workouts, analyze their results, and even provide remote coaching by tracking the runners’ performance online.

The principles of Actively Mobile could also be applied to other sport or work activities.

v) Cellphedia is a project to build a collaborative knowledge base out of mobile phone users' quests for information.

Research of definitions or really anything, is usually an isolated activity. It requires the person researching and a source of reference (i.e. computer or book). My main inspiration, the website Wikipedia has taken reference research one step further by letting anyone edit any definition in their database and share their pieces of knowledge. Google took an additional step in making our life easier and created an SMS service that allow for research on the mobile phone. With Cellphedia, my goals are to make life easier and interesting. I want to bring definitions alive by using the smartest googles! us, people!