ABSTRACT
Introduction Despite its cross-disciplinary identity, the mobilities turn has not capitalized sufficiently on the potential in exploring issues of material design and physical form. This chapter proposes that mobilities research draw on experimental and creative styles of knowing from the design disciplines, in a concrete, critical and potential-oriented engagement with the material world. In Chapter 1 we considered designerly ways of thinking which create the experimental, potentialseeking approaches and evocative attitudes we wish to harness in mobilities design. The analytical disciplines of mobilities research might benefit from such approaches and attitudes, in not only identifying problems but also potentials; this would contribute to resolving larger-scale challenges related to mobilities and societies, such as climate change, demographic shifts and resource scarcity. The goal of this chapter is to pin down the underlying assumptions and streams of thoughts that influence the way we ultimately articulate the emerging research field of mobilities design. Pragmatism is one such stream of thought that we see as an important underpinning of mobilities design. Academics within as diverse fields as geography and philosophy seem to share our understanding of pragmatism as an important source of inspiration (albeit not the only one). From the perspective of geography, Bridge (2008) argues convincingly that pragmatism lends itself, as an analytical framework, to understanding human practices and communication as multisensorial, embodied and not necessarily embedded into language. The extra-linguistic properties of human sense-making and communication have precisely to do with the embodied ‘micro-politics of social life’ that the classic pragmatists, as well as Goffman, were so alert to (ibid.: 1574). And from the perspective of philosophy, Gimmler (2005, 2008, 2012) identifies a shift from a contemplative to an experiential understanding of knowledge and knowledge production as a key dimension of pragmatism. Furthermore, she illustrates that pragmatism focuses on the situational, experimental, relational, interventionist, anti-representational, material, multi-sensiorial and embodied dimensions of human practice, and that empirical phenomena such as mobilities and mobile technologies lend themselves well to the focus of pragmatic investigations.
