Muses and inspirations - getting to know Leora Kornfeld

For MobileMuse.ca, I recently had the pleasure of chatting with Leora Kornfeld of Ubiquity Interactive about what gets her MUSE-ing about mobility, what inspires her, and what she’s wondering about next.

Tell me about yourself! How did you get into MUSEing about mobility?

I’m a fairly portable person so if you combine that with my background in a combination of broadcasting, art history, and media and cultural studies, it sort of forms a picture.  The things I’m most associated with are a radio program called ‘Realtime” that aired on CBC in the mid 90s, which was the world’s first live radio program to combine live email, IRC (what ‘chat’ was called at that time), live phones, and a live radio host.  Along with that, the VUEguide project at the Museum of Anthropology, the location-sensing interactive handheld device that launched in Spring 2005.

I’ve always been fascinated by ‘personal’ media experiences. The introduction of the walkman had a profound influence on me and how I started thinking about personal, portable soundtracks, mix and remix culture.  We could make our own entertainment, and take it with us. 

What does a day in the life of Leora look like?

Many things going on at once.  I start the day reading as much news online as I can, while having my toast and tea, listening to the radio in the background (usually CITR), and then it’s off to Ubiquity’s HQ on Granville Island. Once there I jump into any one of a number of roles…depending on the day I could be a proposal writer, a project manager, an audio or video producer, a salesperson, a mobility researcher… I work closely with our technical lead and our multimedia designer figuring out how to take wild ideas and make them into reality. And sometimes it’s possible.

What do you see us doing in terms of ‘mobility’ someday, or what would you like to see?

I guess my inspiration is always having something new to figure out. I’m never satisfied with same old, same old. I want to do new things, I want to do them in new ways, and I want to learn every time and then apply the learning to my next endeavour. As practitioners in this emerging area all of us at MobleMuse are also researchers to a certain extent, and being able to be both is a privilege.

 In terms of mobility it’s full of surprises in terms of what catches on with people. For example, I never would have thought that texting would become the phenomenon it has. Of course this is owing in part to the cost of the alternative, making a phone call, in Asia, Europe, and the UK, but still…I never would have thought that people would be communicating on such a large scale one thumb and one letter at a time (except in the case of auto-complete of course!). I’m also intrigued by the ways in which people think about their mobile devices as ‘personal’…in an almost cartoon-y or pet-like way…with leopard-print covers and ring tones they change weekly.  And above all it continues to amaze me that people think that when they’re on their cell phone they’re in some sort of private, soundproof space.

What’s your inspiration, and what are some questions you would like to pose to mobility researchers?

The questions that interest me center around ideas about using mobile devices to add another dimension, to augment, our experience of the physical world:

1. What are the ways in which we can best use mobile devices to do this?
2. How do people want to use mobile devices to connect themselves to their networks – either their social networks of friends and peers and family. That is, people they already know, or taste communities, people with whom they share interests and affinities.
3. What types of information do people want when they’re on the go, and how do they want this information presented to them?

We have much to learn about mobile media creation and consumption and it is a wonderful thing that MobileMuse is bringing people together from so many different worlds to encourage us to think about these questions, from many different angles, as a network.

Coming up in our next entry: Leora’s take on her most recent project she’s been working on—the Biennale cell phone tour in Vancouver. Stay tuned.