The Secret Lives of Street Media

So far my blissful career has embraced pure and applied research, industrial R&D, creative writing, exhibition design, program design, venture incubation, and a wonderful variety of interdisciplinary, multi-sector, and collaborative innovation environments.  I’ve been very lucky. And I have some ideas about the best way to explore the potential within mobile media.

Innovation isn’t easy.  There’s no proven formula.  Companies and campuses, for example, approach it with distinct cultures and constraints.  These are abstractions from the real world to support their commercial and academic requirements, respectively.  Yet mobile experience doesn’t fit neatly into these requirements, and it’s definitely about the real world. 

For corporations the problem is that the opportunity isn’t about technology, or content, or services, or communications, but a mash-up alien to traditional engineering and product marketing perspectives.  Using mobile games as an example, the whole games industry is about simulated existence, not synthesis with it.  And while simulation is a profitable rut there’s little incentive to explore what is fundamentally different about mobile experience.

For academics the problem is another mash-up: few are capable of championing mobile experience because it bridges so many domains of inquiry.  For example, an engineering or design research paradigm doesn’t get you very far.  It bogs down.  Universities have contributed beautifully to isolated components of the new media revolution, but they lag the corporate world significantly in the integration of these components.

That’s why MobileMUSE.ca lives in the streets.  We are a collaborative public incubator. There’s no simple recipe for emergence, so we rely on the myriad contexts and affordances of urban culture for our creative critical mass.  We involve industry champions because they’ve got great capabilities and they care about the bottom line.  We involve academic champions from many disciplines because they’ve got great expertise and they care about theory, evidence and communications.   But we start with community organizations – galleries, parks, festivals, museums, etc – because they’ve got great audiences and content and they care about engagement.  And they’re already embedded in the streets. Our simple hypothesis is that they offer the shortest and most valuable path across the mobile experience chasm.

Bringing these disparate champions together is no picnic - think Tower of Babel.  Our unique approach combines an R&D program with an economic and community development engine:

• We’ve developed a methodology that is deeply consultative, driven to the definition of projects that a team of champions can collectively deliver, own, and commercialize with Mobile MUSE help.  The quest for sustainable business models and sustaining partnerships is essential.

• We’re building a common platform and production services to host a mobile media ecosystem.
  

• We’ve positioned ourselves within the vibrant New Media BC (NMBC) industry association to connect with a horde of creative companies, and are working with the Wireless Innovation Network BC (WinBC) and other industry catalysts to provide an effective shared R&D capacity. 

• We partner with industry leaders for access to cellular networks and handset technologies in our city-wide implementations, and are using the broadband WiFi network at UBC as an ‘advanced microcosm’ approximating what urban networks will be like in a few years.
  

We may not have it right yet, but we’re focused, lean and responsive enough to make things happen.

MobileMUSE.ca is the most exciting R&D venture I’ve ever been associated with.