'Playful Identities' research blog » mobile

The Mobile City @Adaptation, Shanghai August 14-17 2010

michiel — Sun, 04 Apr 2010 21:41:31 +0000

‘Designing the Hybrid City’

Dutch Cultural Centre, Shanghai August 16-17 2010

Organized by The Mobile City and Virtueel Platform, in cooperation with Shanghai eArts, V2_, Cybercity Ruhr and Dynamic City Foundation.

Extended background information on ‘Designing the Hybrid City’: http://www.themobilecity.nl/adaptation/

Download the Call for Participation ‘Designing the Hybrid City’ (PDF)

As part of Adaptation, The Mobile City and Virtueel Platform organize ‘Designing the Hybrid City’. This event takes place in Shanghai on August 16-17 and focuses on the role of digital media and technologies in urban design

Mobile and wireless media, as well as technologies that can sense and react to what is happening around them, increasingly shape our urban environment and turn our cities into ‘hybrid cities’. What does this mean for urban design? How should we deal with this emerging relation between new media technologies and the city? Which approaches have already proven successful? Which experiments have the most promise? What can different disciplines involved in urban, media and interface design learn from each other? And how is the process of urban design itself changing?

National news reader’s mobile phone goes off during broadcast

michiel — Sun, 26 Oct 2008 18:54:40 +0000

Just for laughs. Philip Freriks presents the news on the Dutch public television. At the end of the news, during the weather news, his phone goes off…

French study on teens and mobiles

michiel — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 21:45:43 +0000

A recent ethnographic study done in France says young people have a different relation with their phone than most adults. Or rather, through their mobile phone young people relate to their peers, whereas for most adults the mobile phone is a very personal and private item.

The researchers also looked at the practice of mobile sharing:

“There is a growing trend of sharing with teenagers. Phones are more and more objects that circulate within a group, in particular when they have lost their own phone, when it is broken or stolen. The Gripic researchers were surprised to find that a fair number of teenagers didn’t even have their own mobile phone, but just a “replacement mobile”: an object that was ephemeral, non-sacred, cheap and aimed at circulation. The only thing that matters is that it works.” [...]

“In fact, for adults the mobile is a hyper-personal device, an intimate black box with data that absolutely need to be protected. For teenagers on the other hand, the mobile is often as little confidential and intimate as their blogs. They are instead identity and exhibition spaces of oneself, with “museum galleries” of photos, ringtones, videos, and music to share with a community of peers: archiving makes only sense if it can be shared.”

Gripic sees teenager usage of the mobile no longer as “emblematic of an individualistic society”, but rather as “a reflection of collective and collaborative behaviours”.

(English translation from Putting People First)

This supports the idea of gift exchange through the mobile phone, written about by amongst others Taylor & Harper (and by me).

Another interesting finding is that young people learn to use the phone by experimenting, and that they deal with glitches in a “non-dramatic” way.

(Via Small Surfaces)