Recently in mobility Category

I'm pleased to announce that the Handbook of Mobile Communication, edited by James Katz,  with an afterword by Manuel Castells, will be out in July. I have a piece in it co-authored with Jonathan Donner, Nimmi Rangaswamy, and Carolyn Wei, titled "'Express Yourself' and 'Stay Together': The Middle Class Indian Family." It's based on research the four of us did at Microsoft Research India in 2006 and focuses particularly on the domestic sphere.

In fact, if you're around New York tonight, do come by the AIGA-NY Design Remixed event. I'll be speaking about my research projects, including the ones in India. I'd love to see you.

Yesterday, I was at the National Air & Space Museum in Washington DC (both the lovely, huge Dulles hangar and the nostalgically tatty one on the Mall), where the second Apollo Lunar Module is displayed.

... which brings us to two projects by Archigram, the Cushicle and the Fully Applianced House (for which I'm not finding a picture):

"The autonomous Cushicle unit could develop to become part of a more widespread urban system of personalized enclosures," stated Archigram 8's editorial. As was pointed out in class, it's not unlike the iPod, not unlike what Michael Bull said recently in an interview with Wired:

The iPod is a Sherpa -- it has all the things that you want...The iPod allows people to control their environment, more so than any other technology. In a world where we have little sense of control over our everyday lives, it can be very satisfying to control how you interact with your environment... IPod users, mobile phone users, are people who are always in another space. They warm up these alienated spaces with their own pleasure. But what we're really seeing is an increasing denial of shared space.

Another classmate talked about the vulnerability of these membranes. I'd like to imagine that maybe they could protect themselves. Consider this captivating project by Joshua Allen Harris: animals made of plastic bags and tied to the subway grates. They spring to life when the subway runs under the street. (via Boing Boing and Wooster Collective):