Mobile Technologies
Definition
Mobile technologies are computing and communication systems designed to be carried and used while their user is in motion, rather than operated from a fixed position. The category includes the mobile phone and its descendants, wearable devices, portable navigation, mobile networks and the infrastructures — batteries, radio spectrum, satellite positioning, cell siting — that make them possible.
What "Mobile" Actually Changes
The word is often taken to mean "the same computing, but portable." It is more useful to treat mobility as a set of constraints and affordances that reshape everything above them.
Constraints. A mobile device has a hard power budget, which is why battery capacity has driven more design decisions than any other single factor. It has an unreliable network, which means every interaction must tolerate interruption. It has no stable surface and often only one hand available, which creates the text entry problem. It competes for attention with the physical situation the user is in, which means it can never assume it has the user's full attention and must not require it. And it is used in unpredictable light, noise, motion and social contexts.
Affordances. A mobile device knows where it is, which makes location a routine input rather than a special one. It is present at the moment something happens, which makes capture ordinary. It is on the person continuously, which makes sensing continuous. And it is available at the moment of decision, which is why it displaced the desktop for so many tasks that the desktop performed better in every other respect.
Social Consequences
The sociological literature on mobile communication — from Perpetual Contact (2002) onward — identifies a consistent set of changes:
- Micro-coordination. Fixed appointments are replaced by progressively refined arrangements. "Meet at seven outside the cinema" becomes an ongoing negotiation, with the consequence that plans are made later, changed more often, and committed to less.
- Absent presence. The user is partly elsewhere at all times, and the etiquette governing this is still being written.
- The collapse of the away state. Where being out of the house once meant being unreachable, unavailability now requires a deliberate act, which converts it from a condition into a decision that must be explained.
- Location as social currency. Position becomes something to share, withhold, or falsify — see geocloaking.
- Continuous partial documentation. The default expectation that any event was recorded by someone present.
Design Principles
Mobile conditions favour interfaces that are interruptible at any point, that degrade rather than fail when the network drops, that can be understood in a glance rather than read, that use the device's knowledge of context to reduce what the user must specify, and that do not assume the user is safe, seated or alone. These are also, not coincidentally, the principles of calm technology.
