Designing Affective Atmospheres on the Move

In this paper we address the recent call for “Mobilities Design” (Jensen, 2013). Mundane urban spaces of mobilities are not reducible to practical affordances; though we often move through the world with an instrumental purpose of getting from point A to B, we must acknowledge that everyday life travelling “unfolds affects as much as reasons” (Jensen, 2013, p.99). Practices, embodiment, technologies and materialities interconnect in non-quantifiable experiences of mobilities, which may fruitfully be unfolded by means of the concept of “atmosphere”. According to Böhme, atmosphere cannot be reduced to properties or qualities of neither human nor non-human bodies but they are “manifestations of the co-presence of subject and object” (Böhme, 1998, p.114). When travelling in and through spaces of mobilities in everyday life we are co-constituents in an on-flow of aesthetic atmospheres shaping emotional and sensorial experiences of moving. From a designer’s perspective, this opens a potential for working with how spaces of networked mobility can be designed not only to afford unobstructed flows but also interesting and pleasurable everyday mobility practices. This paper aims at an operational concept of atmosphere in mobilities design. Following the pragmatist stance that theories are tools to understand and intervene in the world around us. To do so it draws, on the one hand, on “affective atmospheres” in relation to mobilities research, as articulated by Bissel (2010) and Anderson (2009), and, on the other hand, on design-related research into “urban ambiances”, as framed by Thibaud (2010). Through an exploration of everyday practices of networked mobilities from qualitative empirical material the paper argues for the potential to synthesise such streams of atmosphere research to develop an analytical tool for capturing atmospheres as well as an interventionist tool for orchestrating atmospheres in everyday urban spaces of mobilities. References Anderson, B. (2009) ´Affective Atmospheres´, in: Emotion, Space and Society, pp. 77–81 Bissel, D. (2010) ´Passenger mobilities: affective atmospheres and the sociality of public transport´, in: Environment and Planning D, volume 28, pp. 270-289 Böhme, G. (1998) ´Atmosphere as an aesthetic concept´, in: Daidalos, volume 68, pp. 114 Jensen, O. B. (2013) Staging Mobilities, London: Routledge Thibaud, J. (2011) ´The Sensory Fabric of Urban Ambiances´, in: Senses & Society. pp. 203-215.