ABOUT CALL FOR PARTICIPANTS OUTLINE THE WORKSHOP
Approximately 15 participants will be selected to experience automated journeys in Seoul, Korea.
Researchers and practitioners are invited to describe their thoughts (within the limits of 2 pages) on automated journeys and their relationship to the design and use of technologies by focusing on one of the themes outlined below. We also welcome images, videos, graphics, animations, or whatever else you feel supports your submission - additionally we welcome the suggestion of other themes not mentioned below.
The submission deadline is July 7, 2008.
Acceptance notifications will be sent by July 25, 2008.
Submissions (in .pdf format) should be sent to: johannab@ics.uci.edu.
Automation and Public Interactions
In our cities, automation is becoming more and more prevalent. Fast food is becoming even faster - now one can buy a hamburger in Seoul at McDonalds without having to hand over any cash or even a credit card; contact-less mobile phone payments are now a reality. Additionally, humans are disappearing even more from building security with robots in Korean schools replacing more traditional guards. We can ask, then, with the increasing uptake of automated machines, have urban journeys in Seoul become more individualistic? Does automating technology decrease the level of social interaction or instead give rise to new forms?
Efficiency vs Aesthetics
All sorts of activities are being technologized, often under the guise of efficiency. Stopping off at the toilet while on your way to work once was a straight-forward affair, but now toilet users in Seoul are confronted by toilets with control panels offering heated seats, jets of water, and the sounds of chirping birds. Even cleaning one's mobile phone has become a public service; kiosks that allow you to subject your phone to a sanitizing blast while on the go are popping up all over Seoul. But are all of the technologies found in our cities making our journeys more efficient, or is it just the opposite? Must one choose between a pleasant experience or a fast one, or do urban technologies represent a new form of aesthetic?
Automated Identities
Seoul's T-Money system allows for contact-less payments in city shops as well as on the subway. With a range of options from RFID cards to mobile phone upgrades to tiny plush characters (that can have their credit recharged using USB), there are myriad ways to take advantage of the system. However, such innovations also raise issues around how we are identified in and through our movements. Do e-money technologies such as T-Money make us more or less anonymous now that we can be uniquely identified by our RFID train passes, our mobile phones, our credit cards, and so on? And, more fundamentally, does the presence of this automation in our everyday urban lives offer new ways to present our selves? Are we becoming, in the words of Vertesi, technomorphized?
Layers of Mediation and Interaction
We can no longer conceive only of human-computer interactions as defined by a single person using a technology. A person can interact with a public technology (e.g. a ticket machine) through a more personal one (e.g. a mobile phone). Likewise several people can use the same public technology simultaneously, or a person can interact with others through the technologies around them. Even technologies themselves are beginning to interact on their own. In Seoul it is now possible to have robots park your car or to ride in trains that have no human conductor. How then, we might ask, are these various and complex layers of mediation and interaction manifest as we move through our cities? Moreover, with these layerings, what are the ways in we might come to change our relations with technology and ultimately each other?
The Hybrid of Technology and Tradition
With talk of technology transforming our lives it is easy to overlook the cultural traditions in daily life. But in a city like Seoul technology and tradition exist side by side. In the streets old-style food vendors proliferate, and puffed rice isn't something you make at home with a high-tech cooking device, rather it is something you go out on to the street to purchase from an "old fashioned" no-jeom sang (street seller). At the same time, however, sticker sa-jin (photo sticker) machines are ubiquitous in those same public spaces, allowing people to go out and purchase something made on the fly in a considerably more hi-tech fashion. This begs the question, then, how are, or how could, the technologies we encounter in our everyday journeys intertwine with older low-tech traditions. Is one replacing the other? Is technology introducing new traditions or ones simply reshaping old ones?