ABSTRACT
Mobile methods can enable powerful new insights, as the contributions to this book illustrate. In this chapter we argue that mobile methods can also help to advance sociology ‘beyond societies’ (Urry 2000), a move necessary as social relations are increasingly shaped by global flows and movements and ‘society’ is failing as a unit of analysis to provide analytical grasp of how the social is coconstituted by and constitutive of the material, environmental and technological. However, our enthusiasm for mobile methods is due to more than the theoretical advances they enable. The authors of this chapter are a social scientist-designer and computer scientist working in participatory socio-technical innovation, an engineer-designer and Nokia Champion, and an artist-curator and director of the international Futureverything (previously Futuresonic) festival where participants explore emerging social-technology innovations. We find synergy in connecting our different forms of engagement in socio-technical change. Against a background of – in our experience – extremely fruitful interdisciplinary collaborations between prospective technology users, technology designers, artists and social scientists, and joint orientations towards both ‘basic’ and ‘applied’ research, we show how mobile methods in the context of engaged experimentation can identify directions for desirable innovation (for example, genuinely supporting existing and emergent work practices, creating new media content and added value for customers and companies, and technologies that fit with people’s visions of the ‘good life’). At the same time, the mobile, experimental, public approach we describe yields some sense of, and some control over, unintended consequences of socio-technical change for all involved. The chapter is structured as follows. First, a discussion of key motivations for mobile, experimental, public research provides some background to our argument. We then turn to examples to make the potential of a mobile, experimental, public approach concrete, beginning with Coulton’s ‘Mobile Radicals’ projects, which often involve large-scale experimental public release of mobile ‘beta’ technologies. Several issues arise here, but we focus on changing conceptions and practices of location privacy and community involvement as particularly important. The next example, drawing on ethnographic observations during a participatory innovation project with police and fire-service professionals,
develops this inquiry, broadening our concern with location privacy to explore increasing possibilities for surveillance. Third, examples of art and design interventions open up potentially disruptive spaces of play and mass participation. At several junctures, mobile methods are showcased in their potential to take debate beyond utopian/dystopian binaries and into informed shaping of sociotechnical possibilities and dangers. Mobile methods can drive the emergence of a new kind of public ‘experimentality’ (Szerszynski et al. 2008), which could be key to the ‘collective experimentation’ needed to address complex contemporary socio-technical challenges such as, for example, CO2 emissions from transport and the threat of Orwellian surveillance that accompanies ‘intelligent transport solutions’ to this challenge (Wynne and Felt 2007; Dennis and Urry 2009). Mobile, experimental, public methods from our examples might enable new forms of control in socio-technical innovation.
