Mobile

In the mid 2000s, while working at the IBM Center for Social Software, I was struck by how significant these tiny pocket-rectangles with access to GPS and cameras were becoming.

The whole world is different when you can layer another reality on top of the one that you're in.

These days it's nearly impossible to imagine a world without smartphones, but in 2010 the iPhone had only been out for three years and GPS data was only fairly recently available with accuracy in non-military applications. I organized a conference called The Social and the Spacial to explore these ideas further.

This work would follow me for a decade or more. As the cost of these devices continued to nosedive and they become nearly the ubiquitous computing that we were promised, I focused on mobile and web technology as a way to explore how people occupy and move through space.

I designed, built, coded and shipped several apps and the toolchains to support them, looking for ways to directly support people using mobile devices to change the world around them.

• What does it mean to explore your environment through a lens?
• Who has a right to "own" what stories are told in a location?
• What types of stories would you tell if you could?
• What does fiction do to our sense of reality?
• Can text messages change the way we experience history?
• Can mobile devices change the way we encounter archives?