An Englishman walks onto the stage. His name is Steve Pemberton and without any further introduction he starts to talk about mobility. I thought he was famous because he didn’t tell anything about his background or current activities. Maybe he did something great that made him famous before I was born?

He continued his story with pictures of himself and a mobile phone. He talked about how new mobile technologies are changing our lives. A few anecdote’s and pictures later he had built A bridge to the introduction of the first keynote speaker of the day.

Last Thursday, May 22th, 2008, a conference called ‘The Web and Beyond’ took place in the Beurs van Berlage in Amsterdam. On behalf of Eden Design & Communication a few colleagues and myself could attend this very well organized and inspirational bi-annual conference on human-computer interaction, organized by CHI Netherlands. This year Mobility was the main theme.

Adam Greenfield, author of ‘Everyware’ and ‘The city is here for you to use: Urban form and experience in the age of ubiquitous computing’ was the first of four keynote speakers. He spoke about mobility, the urban life and new trends in cities and social interaction that he finds worrying. Like the McDonald’s and Starbucks on every corner. Or the use of iPods and mobile phones as devices to cut yourself off from society on the bus or subway.
In Greenfield’s opinion unpleasant environments like subway stations or waiting rooms contribute a lot to this problem. He also thinks this problem can be solved by using the same mobile technology and implementing them into these unpleasant environments to make them more fun to be in.
This pretty abstract vision is hard to understand without some practical examples like the one Robert Gaal gave us later that afternoon.
Robert is a co-founder of the Roomware Project:

“Roomware comes from the terms ‘room’ and ’software’ and is a software application running in a defined physical space. People in a Roomware enabled space can use the services running on a local server through their mobile phone, laptop or other means to communicate through technology. The Roomware Project is an open-source framework for interactive spaces. It allows developers of multiple origins to enhance any venue or event using technologies such as BlueTooth and RFID.”¹

He ended his presentation with a demonstration of his software. After booting the application in OSX’s Terminal it immediately detected all cellphones, with Bluetooth enabled, in the room. After that it gave each cellphone an instrument and therefore a complete orchestra started playing. Whenever someone would turn off his of her Bluetooth that particular instrument stopped playing. This example was regularly used on toilets during big concerts or festivals.
The room immediately became a lot more pleasant to be in and suddenly it became clear to me what Greenfield was talking about.

Co-founder of Jaiku, (a Scandinavian version of Twitter which was bought by Google a while ago), Jyri Engestr