Living for the Global City: Mobile Kits, Urban Interfaces, and Ubicomp
I just finished reading an interesting paper from the UBICOMP 2005 conference, called "Living for the Global City: Mobile Kits, Urban Interfaces, and Ubicomp". It's available online for a fee, but if you hunt around you can find a free copy.
Anyway the paper was cool. The authors looked at young urban professionals in three citiies, LA, Tokyo, and London and looked at how the technology that they carried with them interfaced with the infrastructure in their location. The researchers were interested in what services were trusted and which were not and how private and public things were mediated by infrastructure.
Some cool quotes which give a flavor of the paper:
"We also sought with some skepticism, to assess the notion that places like London, L.A., and Tokyo actually form a coherent category - that they are essentially a single, distributed place, despite their apparent diferences."
"Much of what they carried with them are interface tokens" [emphasis mine]
"Mobile Kit" : this is the collection of technology, old and new that people carry with them.
"L.A., in particular, has captured the imagination of a group of urban theorists, resulting in an emerging field of 'Los Angeles Studies' ."
"What differences (if any) between global cities matter? To what degree is it warranted to talk of 'the global city' or 'urban computing' as if they were unitary domains?"
"Cocooning items...items that allow escape from one's current environment through creating a kind of 'bubble' in which outside distractions are shut out. ...iPod...."
Neat paper, one of those things that you read that inspire creative thinking because they are the result of good creative thinking.
(Stuff That I've Read For "Fun") Permanent Link made 5:00 PM | TrackBacks (0)