At Home in Brussels: Professional mobility as a service

An emerging generation of mobile applications is viewing mobility as a way to create interactive experiences that rely on or exploit movement and space. These applications provoke new ways of thinking about movement and spatial practice in technology-mediated contexts. This contemporary generation of applications is establishing a body of research that begins to frame urban mobility as an everyday fact and a new opportunity to assist in professional mobility of expatriates, or expats. These applications present a less instrumental account of urban living by looking for inspiration not only in the available technologies but also in the broader experiences of urban life.

This paper tackles the issue of media and the city from a technological angle. Due to technical improvements, different computational technologies are assisting an increasing number of people in a multiplicity of daily life activities. One characteristic today is the emergence of a host of mobile applications ranging from PDAs to smart phones. On the one hand these technologies have the potential to create interactive experiences that rely on or exploit movement and space within urban settings. On the other hand this potential has provoked a number of visions that these mobile technologies can assist citizens in a lot of daily life urban activities. This paper seeks to address the address how mobile applications should be designed and implemented so that they actually can be integrated into a wide range of everyday urban contexts and assist people in their daily city life. Second, it will pay attention to one kind of experience that is often ignored in present urban computing design, the transition from one place to another, from country to another.

We will argue that it is necessary to adopt a social view on urban computing design in order to counterbalance the actual dominance of techno-centric approaches that focus solely on technological challenges. The city is presented as a homogeneous and void space that is only there to be filled with mobile technologies that connect citizens anywhere and anytime with data. Mobility is framed solely in functional ways and hence only problematised from an angle of disruption, dislocation, and disconnection in data-flows when moving from one place to the next (Bassoli, 2010). On the contrary, we argue that, inspired by social shaping of technology theories (Bijker et al, 1987 - McKenzie &Wajcman, 1985) and particularly domestication research (Silverstone & Haddon, 1996) designers should take a social view by on technology adoption by analysing how users and non-users actually understand the use of new technologies from their daily life urban context. Consequently, mobility should be seen from a cultural perspective and thus how people actually interpreted this in different ways (Dourish et al, 2007). Within computing design, such a social perspective has only recently been adopted. However, where the sphere of work and home has been researched, mobility in urban context is only slightly emerging and has only been researched for a few contexts that moreover tend to be described in very abstract and generalised terms (Bassoli, 2010). In particular, not much attention has been given to the transition from one place to another within cities and between cities.

The second purpose of this paper is, therefore, to yield insight into such transitions by conducting an empirical investigation of a relocation service mobile application developed for professionals relocating to the city of Brussels. By deploying a Living Lab approach (with over 700 participants), we will highlight the importance of the concept of 'in-betweenness' (Anderson & De Paula, 2006; Bassoli, 2010) in order to grasp the socio-cultural dynamics of mobility between and within cities and how this can be usefully employed in social urban computing design.