The use of a mobile phone within the street has become such a common sight that we almost ignore it. Our ability to divide our attention adequately enough to hold a phone conversation and navigate through the hustle and bustle of the high street has been readily adapted from simply walking with a friend. Over the past year or two we have been looking at how the technology of mobile devices might progress and how this might impact on the public realm.
Clearly walking and talking hasn’t been too hard to master but walking and texting is quite a bit harder. I have heard of people that can text without looking, a skill developed following an office ban on the use of mobiles but for most of us it’s a stop start affair. We need to split our concentration, focusing on our surroundings then focusing on our text. We observed this behavior regularly during our research and it got us thinking about how this might develop given the rise in popularity of smart phones and mobile Internet access. At the crux of the issue is our need to split our senses, we can work fine if our sight navigates and our hearing and speech deal with the other inputs but if we are mobile and try to absorb information from a small screen then it becomes more difficult.
It became obvious to us that people would use a technique whereby they intermediately accessed their visual information, sidelining themselves for a moment before moving on. If we extend this technique beyond texting and looked at what might happen if the information was more complex or more time consuming, for example accessing an internet map or uploading a video then it is possible that people could end up moving though the public realm via a series of ‘waypoints’. These way points being, benches, shop doorways, bus stops, walls or steps, anywhere that would allow them to reduce their concentration on their surrounding and focus on their online action.
It might be possible to argue that this behavior could influence or be facilitated by landscape design. This could be done by creating delibrate waypoints along major foot roots. These small stop points might also be commercially exploited (perhaps via bluetooth). However, for us we this behavior points to a more complex issue that technology will ultimately address.
The issue is that current technology requires us to occupy two spaces at once, our physical space and a virtual one. At home in front of the computer this is fine, very little attention is demanded from your safe physical surroundings, but in the street it is very different, giving too much attention to your mobile device whilst in the public realm could prove dangerous. The answer to this kind of technology is to try to be more efficient in blending the two realities, to provide additional information that overlays the physical reality, it’s technical term is augmented reality. The various components that would make up a system are being worked on at universities around the world and we will try to outline the how this system might work and how it will effect the use of the public realm in further posts.
