Mobilities Design: Towards an experimental field of research and practice

Contemporary society is marked and defined by the ways in which mobile goods, bodies, vehicles, objects, and data are organized, moved and staged. On the backgound of the ‘mobilities turn’ (for short review paper on this see; Sheller 2011, Vannini 2010) this paper proposes a further development of the perspective in the direction of a material and design oriented turn. In order to fulfill this purpose we articulate a new and emerging research field, namely that of ‘mobilities design’. In our understanding time has come to articulate ‘Mobilities Design’ as a dedicated research field in and of its own. There is a need for research targeting the material, physical and design-oriented dimensions of the multiple mobilities from the local to the global. Despite its cross-disciplinary identity the ‘mobilities turn’ has not sufficiently capitalized from the potential in exploring issues of material design and physical form. The exchange value with design is twofold; first this means getting closer to the ‘material’ which is needed if mobilities research can claim to have understood contemporary mobilities, second it means that the creative, explorative and experimental approaches of the design world becomes within reach to mobilities research offering new potentials for innovative research. Design research, on the other hand, might enter into a fruitful relationship with mobilities research, offering a ‘mobile’ lens on design objects and issues, including, but arguably not limited to, methodological insights, concepts of space and place, and relations between fixities and flows. The new and emerging field of ‘mobilities design’ will be exploring the borderlines between architecture, urban design, urban planning, and infrastructure design. The field will address the ‘gap’ in research on an issue of increasing concern and societal importance, regardless if the focus is on new inequalities, environmental sustainability, or the meaning of vernacular mobilities design to the everyday life. The theme of ‘mobilities design’ opens up the agenda of architectural research into infrastructure spaces as ‘spaces of life’ for billions of people in the everyday life.

This paper is structured in three parts. After the general introduction we present the mobilities theory perspective of ‘staging mobilities’ and connects this to the empirical phenomenon of parking lots and their design. The paper ends in section three with some concluding remarks.