mobile media

With the help of Industry Canada, Mobile MUSE has completed a plan (attached) for expanding the impact of its applied innovation model beyond the Arts & Culture sector into other key public-facing industry sectors including Environment, Health and Tourism.  Your comments and ideas are welcome!

For those who survived our longest solstice night and are tuned to seasonal celebrations, here’s a chestnut about mobile context-aware community narratives that hopefully brings some warm inspiration to your fireside reflections.

Christmas is just one child within a large family of cultural traditions that were born from or married into ancient human observances of the winter solstice.  As an astronomer-by-first-vocation living in Vancouver I was intrigued to study the miraculous birth story of the Pacific north coast, sometimes called Raven and the First People or Raven Steals the Daylight.  One dimension of this story is captured brilliantly in Haida artist Bill Reid’s “The Raven and the First Men” sculpture at UBC’s Museum of Anthropology. Raven is a complex trickster and this story is a focal point of the Raven Traveling myth cycle.  The epic poetry of north coast mythology is illuminated in Robert Bringhurst’s fascinating trilogy starting with “A Story as Sharp as a Knife”.

My good friend Chuck Hamilton at IBM is part of a team championing “serious games” and “serious play” as an emerging global business opportunity.  The driving vision is that a major part of the world’s economy may be transacted within virtual environments like SecondLife within a generation.  In retail, for example, the text-heavy flatness of online shopping will be replaced with bustling, shopper-intensive, clerk-attentive, and product-rich 3D experiences.  I’m sure many of these dreams will come to virtuality, but I’m much more interested in how they will come to reality – how our first and second lives will blend productively using mobile media.

Ants and bees build amazing homes, but no creature can match the human obsession for augmenting living landscapes with built structures. And you haven’t seen anything yet.  Think about our deeper obsession with media.  What happens when we’re able to augment our built environments with media structures? Cities formed of bricks and glass are about to be reformed with media and meaning. Welcome to the semantic city.

The world is experiencing an interesting reversion of power from nation-states back to city-states.  While recent world is flat thinking focuses on the growth of a planet-state, the real phenomenon is that nation-states are diminishing with respect to both the planet-state and city-states, so that creative city-states are peaking strongly on a flattening landscape.  So yes, the world is already city-spiky.  And the spikes will get much sharper as mobile media begin to reinvent urban experience.  How and why?  Urban lifestyle potentials will expand enormously as the semantic web couples with ambient culture and built infrastructure. 

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.