Mobilities Design

Urban Designs for Mobile Situations

Ole B. Jensen, Ditte Bendix Lanng

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317526926
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Contemporary society is marked and defined by the ways in which mobile goods, bodies, vehicles, objects, and data are organized, moved and staged. Against the background of the 'mobilities turn' this book articulates a new and emerging research field, namely that of 'mobilities design'. The book revolves around the following research question: How are design decisions and interventions staging mobilities? It builds upon the 'Staging Mobilities' model (Jensen 2013) in an exploratory inquiry into the problems and potentials of the design of mobilities. The exchange value between mobilities and design research is twofold. To mobilities research this means getting closer to the 'material', and to engage in the creative, exploratory and experimental approaches of the design world which offer new potential for innovative research. Design research, on the other hand, might enter into a fruitful relationship with mobilities research, offering a relational and mobile design thinking and a valuable basis for design reflections around the ubiquitous structures, spaces and systems of mobilities.

1 Introduction to mobilities design

Mobile situations and inconspicuous materialities

Imagine a rainy autumn afternoon. You are walking along the pathway on your route to do some grocery shopping. In a few more steps you will enter a tunnel, providing a passage under a big road. As you move through the tunnel, you get a moment of shelter from the rain. A few kids enter from the opposite direction, stopping to shout some words, which resonate in the enveloping concrete space. You notice some new, bright graffiti on the concrete wall, and quickly – without deliberation – you stroke your hand across it. As you exit the tunnel, you encounter the rain and grey skies again. You make a turn to the left and must put some effort into getting across a muddy puddle on the side of the path before you move slightly upwards. You now have a view of a parking lot. Not that many cars are there, and you stroll directly onto the asphalt surface. A few larger puddles have collected here and there, and as you walk around one, you notice a trace of oil in it. In one of the others, a toddler is jumping up and down, laughing loudly. You run into an acquaintance along the way and stop between a parked car and the shopping-cart shed to greet him and chat. A bit farther on, you reach the supermarket. After your shopping, you need to go to the pharmacy. It is located on the other side of the road, only a few hundred metres away. You make your way with your grocery bags to the verge of the road. It is slippery now; only small tufts of grass keep the ground from getting too muddy. Some cars drive by, and you move back a little to avoid getting splashed. Shortly after, you seize the chance to take some quick steps across the first two lanes and you reach the central reserve. Again a few cars drive by. This time you cannot avoid your clothes getting splashed. There’s a pause in the flow of cars and you continue across the road.

Along this imaginary journey, you have been engaged with various ordinary materialities of mobilities: a pathway, a concrete tunnel, a muddy reserve, an asphalt parking lot, a wide road, etc. In diverse ways, these materialities have enabled and put constraints on your journey. They have been performative in co-orchestrating your experience and practice of mobility. But these materialities have not acted in isolation. Rather, they have worked in situational effects, with multiple visible and invisible material and immaterial bodies: the rain, your (wet) shoes, your grocery bags, cars and many other things. Not least, as you moved through these physical environments, many other people have been on other journeys, creating myriads of small interactive situations. The many small interactions with other people and with materialities are marked by routine and the mundane habitual practice that you are hardly conscious of . A few may, however, have been marked by their breaks in routine. As you travel, you are ‘doing mobilities’ as a set of embodied performances that reaches from walking on various pavements to measuring your quickest route and negotiating your crossing of a big road.

This book is about Mobilities Design. Obviously, the mobile situations of everyday mobilities, like the imaginary ones above, are marked and defined by decisions taken elsewhere: in planning departments, architectural offices and city governments. Design contributes to ‘staging mobilities from above’. But a large number of decisions and choices are also made by you, ‘staged from below’, either in a non-reflexive, routine manner or in deliberate and conscious accord with your values and perception of Self (for example, sustainable transport-mode choices or the way you choose to walk past people or the negotiation of a seat on the bus). Mundane mobile situations are taking place in physical environments, often as social interactions and always as embodied performances. This ‘situational approach’ to mobilities is presented theoretically and empirically elsewhere (Jensen 2013, 2014). In this book, we wish to zoom in on the material dimension of mobile situations by exploring the physical sites and artefacts of mobilities. We will not omit the social and the embodied dimensions (which are the two other elements in the situational analytical framework) but we will centre attention on the ‘doings’ of designed materialities, as these provide the physical environments for mobilities to be played out. We shall in particular look into the urban design field, which contributes by shaping mundane mobile materialities, and we will explore how the fascinating nexus between materialities and bodies on the move pan out in specific designs. En route, we shall visit again the inconspicuous and ordinary material sites of the imaginary journey above. These belong to some of the ubiquitous material realities of our mobile, everyday lives. By connecting the situational understanding of mobilities as they are practised and experienced with urban design, we ‘learn to see’ such ordinary mundane ‘non-places’ (Augé 1995) as materialities ripe with mobilities design issues significant to our well-being, social life, safety, equal rights and the future of cities and mobilities. In short, the sites we will visit epitomize both important design potentials and design problems. We hope you are ready for the journey, which most likely will take you to familiar territories but hopefully in fairly unfamiliar and rewarding ways.

The structure of this introductory chapter is the following: after the imaginary journey and the opening motivation above, we walk you through the background for our articulation of the field of mobilities design. Hereafter, we shall make a formal and brief introduction to the ‘mobilities turn’ as the research field within which we locate our work. Next, we devote a section to identifying the relevant dimensions of the design field we propose to engage. In this initial voicing of mobilities design, we are predominantly looking towards urban design. After the urban design identification and discussion, we explore a wider set of issues related to the ways in which designers more broadly contemplate, act and innovate – what we term ‘designerly ways of thinking’, which we appreciate as a nerve to mobilities design. Following this exploration, we present the three selected ‘matters of concern’ for this endeavour into mobilities design: atmospheres, environmental sustainability and inequality. We shall motivate their relevance and presence within this work and we shall qualify their relationships to three empirical cases that we also present in an overview format. The chapter ends with an outline of the general structure of the full book.

Background

Contemporary societies are marked and defined by the ways mobile goods, bodies, vehicles, objects and data are organized, moved and ‘staged’. Against the background of the ‘mobilities turn’ (Cresswell 2006; Urry 2007), this book articulates a new and emerging research field, namely that of ‘mobilities design’. It revolves around the following research question: How are design decisions and interventions staging mobilities – or how are they preventing particular mobilities? It builds upon the Staging Mobilities model, referred to above (Jensen 2013) and in theoretical and empirical research into the nexus of mobilities and design (Jensen 2013; Lanng 2015), in an exploratory inquiry into the problems and potentials of the design of mobilities. The exchange value between mobilities and design research is twofold. For mobilities research, this means getting closer to the ‘material’ and engaging in the creative, exploratory and experimental approaches of the design world, which offer potential for innovative research. Design research, on the other hand, might enter into a fruitful relationship with mobilities research, offering a ‘mobilized’ design thinking and a valuable basis for an approach, which can recognize mobility, contingency and relationality in the design of structures, spaces and systems of mobilities. The aim of and motivation behind writing this book is, in other words, to explore the design-dimension of the mobile practices in the everyday life of billions of people. (The cases and examples explored here are, however, predominantly from our Western experience and need further exploration into the global multiplicities of multicultural experiences in order to be fully justified.) We see a need for transgressing the disciplinary and regulatory silos that offer us either academic analysis and theory building or planning solutions based on the worldviews of discrete professions. We shall illustrate this by engaging the design and architecture of the spaces of everyday life from the point of the new ‘mobilities turn’. By doing so, we connect two important domains that until now have had too little interaction. We are thus motivated to write this book by the desire to advance how design may learn from mobilities research and, conversely, how mobilities research may learn from design. There are many design professions that may have relevance and pose various relevant questions. In very general terms these include: how industry shapes artefacts and vehicles; how service design shapes information interfaces; how building architecture shapes the houses hosting mobilities; how interaction design creates the system interfaces; how software design shapes the apps that facilitate urban navigation, etc. Such numerous design disciplines are of relevance to a fully fledged understanding of the importance of design to mobilities. Here, however, we shall mainly refer to urban design as the design field in question (and we shall return to our understanding and definition of this below). This is because we wish to focus on the spaces ‘between the buildings’, where much quotidian mobile life takes place, and because the research underlying this book originates from an academic urban design research environment.

From mobilities turn towards mobilities design

Before we can discuss the field of mobilities design, we need to explain the key ideas behind the ‘mobilities turn’. We shall do this rather in brief since there is no shortage of fine review texts and overviews (for example, Adey et al. 2014; Cresswell 2010; Cresswell and Merriman 2011; Keeling 2008; Shaw and Hesse 2010; Sheller 2011; Sheller and Urry 2006; Vannini 2010). The main concern is movement. As the field has expanded into various disciplines, the movement of people, goods, vehicles, information, data, images, ideas and much more has entered the agenda. As well as many others, we consider Urry’s landmark text (2000) to be one of the central launching pads of the new ‘mobilities turn’. Needless to say, no single person constitutes a completely new field of research and many other scholars will be referenced in this short overview (see Jensen 2015: 1–18 for a more detailed discussion of the history of the ‘turn’, its focus areas, disciplines and not least ‘intellectual infrastructures’).

Urry’s key point was a critique of a static and ‘mobility blind’ approach to social sciences in general. ‘Society as a thing’ rather than society as a ‘set of relations’ was the intellectual backdrop of this academic revolt. Certainly one may find different indications of this understanding before: for example, Simmel’s work (1998) is identified as predominantly important in this respect (see Urry 2007; Jensen 2015). However, the ambitions of building grand theories of an ‘a-spatial’ and ‘mobility blind’ nature (Urry 2007) was in many ways the order of the day within mainstream social science (geography being a clear exception). Besides arguing against such a ‘sedentary’ understanding of the social in times of globalization (ibid.), the mobilities turn also took as its underpinning rationale that all the myriads of different movements we are embedded in have more than their mere physical effects of displacement, aggregation and movement. Thus the one-liner credo of the mobilities turn: Mobilities is more than A to B! The repercussions of these complex mobilities in different directions such as social networks, capital formation, politics, planning and environment are important enough on their own, but the ‘more than A to B’ claim goes deeper. In our research, we have traced how the ‘more than’ effects of mobilities deeply touch the way we inhabit the material world, the way we interact socially and the way we think of ourselves in the midst of all this. The credit of the mobilities turn is thus to have rendered well-known and self-evident practices, systems and structures open to new understanding and interpretations. The mobilities turn has, with its eclectic approach, combined many strands of thinking, from post-structuralist thinking on Actor-Network Theory (ANT) to Science and Technology Studies (see Sheller 2011 for a discussion of the wide array of theoretical inspirations for the mobilities turn).

So instead of speaking of transport as the displacement of things, people and goods, the mobilities turn articulates the wider-reaching term ‘mobilities’, generating a non-sedentary research agenda for exploring the fact that sociality is defined by flows and movement (or obstruction). This, however, does not imply that transportation scholars are unaware of the insights in mobilities research. In fact, mobilities research opens up this exploration even more towards a cross-disciplinary endeavour. Here we will reference two of the major voices in the field, Urry and Cresswell. We rely on Jensen’s previous work for a rough map of the key concerns (Jensen 2015: 1–18). According to Urry, a new and mobility-oriented social science should (2000: 18–19):

• Develop a sociology focusing upon movement, mobility and contingent ordering

• Examine the effects of corporeal, imagined and virtual mobilities of people

• Consider things as ‘social facts’

• Embody the analysis by including the sensuous constitutions of humans and objects

• Investigate the uneven and diverse reach of networks and flows

• Examine temporal regimes and modes of dwelling and travelling

• Describe the bases of people’s sense of dwelling and their dependencies upon various mobilities

• Comprehend the changing nature of citizenship, rights and duties

• Illuminate the increased mediatization of social life and their ‘imagined communities’

• Investigate the changing powers and determinations of state powers

• Explain changes within states’ regulating mobilities

• Interpret chaotic, unintended and non-linear social consequences of mobilities

• Explore whether there is an emergent global and autopoietic system.

On a more profound and yet basic level, Cresswell proposes that a mobilities-research agenda should foreground the following six key questions (Cresswell 2010: 22–6):

• Why does a person or thing move?

• How fast does a person or thing move?

• In what rhythm does a person or thing move?

• What route does a person or thing take?

• How does it feel to be moved/be moving?

• When and how does a person or thing stop?

This is a rather shorthanded approach for the sake of the overview. Since we will dive deeper into the theoretical arguments and approaches later, this should give the reader a sense for now of what the mobilities turn means and how it is an important backdrop to this book.

From the overview of key ideas within the mobilities turn, we now move to our main issue: the interface between mobilities and design. The new and emerging research field of mobilities design pulls threads from both mobilities and design research in addressing the persistent issues of shaping spaces, structures and systems of mobilities in our contemporary world. It is no novel insight that integrative and cross-disciplinary thinking is needed to deal with societal challenges related to mobilities. Lynes wrote a brief paper, titled ‘Mobility and Design’, in the Harvard University design journal in 1965 connecting these two issues, albeit in an early discussion of the matter. Likewise, Buchanan raised the issue in the his seminal 1963 British report ‘Traffic in Towns’: he noticed that one of the challenges in achieving good planning and design solutions seemed to lie in the separation of ‘traffic’ from ‘architecture’ (Buchanan 1964: 67). In a rather bold proposition, he put forward the notion of ‘traffic architecture’ to remedy this problem. As history has proved, the problem of separating traffic from architecture is still around. However, we believe there was a lot of truth and insight to this. In a similar vein, and with contemporary urbanism and mobilities as the context, we propose that one of the ways we may move towards more insightful and innovative proposals and solutions for the challenges facing contemporary cities is to embark on a trajectory of thinking that combines mobilities with design. The promise of an emerging field of mobilities design is explored in detail later. One note of clarification is important though. Just as the mobilities turn has rendered the notion of transport too narrow, so has the particular situational and pragmatic focus on everyday life mobilities provided an impetus to move from architecture to ‘design’. As we ask the key question how are design decisions and interventions staging mobilities? we immediately move towards a wider understanding of the material conditions underpinning mobilities. Hence the move towards ‘design’. For example, it is relevant to not only discuss buildings and public pathways but also algorithms of traffic-light intervals, apps guiding people through the means of a new digital layer of information, the user-technology interface of all sorts of contemporary infrastructural systems, and so on. Therefore, rather than looking at architecture proper (which does have the attention of mobilities design), we open up the perspective utilizing the notion of mobilities design to understand the choices and decisions taken ‘elsewhere’ which shape the situational context (see Figure 1.1). We are, in other words, broadly interested in design decisions and interventions that shape situational practices of mobilities, but we also base this investigation on the city and its public spaces and infrastructural landscapes – hence the foregrounding of urban design.

We are not alone in arguing for the wider scope of design. In an interview for the design journal Domus, McGuirk discusses with the dean of Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, Moshen Mostafavi, a wider design understanding versus a more narrow architecture conception. McGuirk finds that the concept of design has become more ‘elastic’ over the last decade, so that it is no longer considered a sub-discipline of architecture but rather a wide field, ranging from products to systemic design. He states that ‘design has developed a more ambitious discourse than architecture, an almost expansionist rhetoric in terms of the things that design believes it can tackle’ (McGuirk 2015). Mostafavi agrees in retaining such a principal concept of design and suggests that architecture could be better able to ‘incorporate some...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Foreword
• 1 Introduction to mobilities design
• 2 A new material turn in mobilities research
• 3 Mobilizing designed artefacts
• 4 Methods in mobilities design
• 5 Tunnel atmospheres
• 6 Sustainable parking lots?
• 7 Road-crossing inequalities
• 8 Conclusions and perspectives
• Bibliography
• Index