Interview On culture of mobility -Aditya Dev Sood

Interview:
How would you define mobility?
Mobility is the ability to manage time, location and information effectively.The world's ongoing mobile revolution promises to allow new access to communities with low human, institutional and media densities. Mobile technologies - both products and services - promise to provide alternatives for those who now suffer from poor physical infrastructure, including a lack of roads, transport networks, reliable electricity and varieties of communications media.
How has increased mobility affected your life, both professionally and socially?
Mobile access is essential for running a company across three cities, and for international business trips. I began the company in 2002, so I can't imagine how people did it in the bad old days.
Is life becoming easier or more complicated?
Hah!It's murder trying to discuss visual design elements over the phone; that's been true for a while. Trying to do so under conditions of mobility, pacing and cursing, gesticulating and imagining what the other party might be saying and meaning, is always a futile exercise.Mobility facilitates the coordination of face-to-face communication, which is a precondition for resolution of the complications of everyday life.
What aspects of mobility would you enhance to make your life even easier?Even easier?
Never signed off on that! See above!I need mobile printing.I need a location-based contacts diary.I need a location-based buddy listing.I need a true global clock.I need help integrating every new phone into my life.Describe a typical day in your life.9.15 Hit traffic jam.Call office and complain about traffic jam.Give instructions over phone in advance of my arrival.Call family and complain about Bangalore traffic.Call friends and complain about Bangalore traffic.Listen to radio to discover alternative routes.Check possible routes with the office.Drive using human real-time duplex voice remote navigation.10.30 Hit work.Email, email, email.11.00 Iced tea and delayed meeting with admin team.Admin - We want to build a lab with a one-way viewing mirror.Finance - We have to prepare our annual report for directors.HR - We want to hire new people, but we'd have to fire someone first.12.30 Early lunch in office cafeteria with potential venture partner.1.30 Telecon with London/Beijing. 2.00 Review of visual stimulus for concept-development workshop (project #1).4.00 Field research planning meeting (project #2).5.00 Telecon with Mumbai/Delhi.Timeline possible upcoming projects with Indian tech companies.5.30 Review data from the field (project #3).Critique field implementations of research tools.Sociologically analyze photographs and diagrammatic data.Run team exercise on collaborative concept development.Train designers and field staff.8.30 Leave office.
How is mobility important in relation to your work/cause?
There are 75 million mobile phone subscriptions in India, and we might see 270 million active connections by 2010. This means one in five Indians will have a mobile phone, and almost every household in India will be connected. The mobile phone must now be seen as an essential platform through which to deliver social welfare and other institutional services. This can truly change the lives of the vast majority of Indians, especially those who do not live in urban centers.
Why should we care about what you do?
At CKS we are interested in harnessing the capabilities of new technologies for emerging economies such as India's. We believe that our approach will ensure that the maximum benefit of these capabilities can reach the largest numbers of people who would be otherwise most disadvantaged in terms of their access to social and institutional resources.Although we are based in India, we have developed new conversations and partnerships with like-minded organizations in Latin America, East Asia and Africa. These partnerships will be key to ensuring that the work we do in India has global consequences.
Who in your professional experience has particularly inspired you, and why?
Natalie Jeremijenko is a media artist and design engineer based in New York and San Diego. Her work is always shocking and yet profound, tongue-in-cheek yet irrefutable in its foundational insight and questioning. Yao Bin is the curator of 11-art.com, a media art center in Beijing that attracts artists from China and around the world to examine the poetic possibilities of communications technology. Artists seek to make beauty and meaning in the world, he says; their efforts are not driven by the desire for money.Juha Huuskonen is the founder and producer of the pixelACHE DJ/VJ festival, which has taken place in Helsinki, Stockholm, Paris, Bogota and Sao Paolo, and will perhaps come to New Delhi in 2007. Juha's events are un-selfconsciously about pleasure - visual, acoustic, tactile, sensory, intellectual, discursive and technologically mediated. They're also run on a shoestring off his laptop and remote server.Ashok Jhunjhunwala is the founder and head of the Tenet Research Group at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras in Chennai. An electronic engineering professor, he has become more and more influential in all conversations having to do with the use of technology in rural areas ofIndia. Until recently he didn't have a mobile phone, but I believe that's now changed. He was one of the first to believe in CKS, and remains an important orientation point for CKS.
What can be done in the long term to sustain the work you're doing now?
The work we do at CKS becomes viable only when a society becomes responsible for its own technological bases, and comes to understand that it must imagine, design and develop the technologies that it needs. There is no question that India is on the threshold of that moment.Insofar as CKS remains solvent and sustainable, our work will continue to be cut out for us, as Indian and other emerging-economy companies become responsible for more and more complex chunks of the global techno-ecology.
What is your biggest anxiety and consolation when you think of the future?
Rapid change that leads to a better future for all can still be traumatic. Change itself needs to be better designed.I think India's experience in the last 30 years compares favorably with other parts of the (then) developing world, including China, South Africa and Brazil.I am concerned that other parts of the world might experience extreme shocks and waves of uncertainty if the different sectors of their society are not in alignment with one another. I am concerned that India's achievements so far in this regard may come to be lost, for any number of reasons that cannot be anticipated.I am concerned that ecological sensibilities and an orientation toward sustainable and equitable futures are not innate to Indians, nor are they widely ingrained in Indian public institutions.
How can we (Joe and Jane Public) help fight from your corner?
Demand better-designed and easier-to-use products and services that are also responsible socially, culturally and ecologically. Demand more, be more expressive of your needs and choose your needs with consideration for your own context and environment.
What will you be concentrating on next?
One of the most important things we can do at CKS is to help frame the debate on financial services on the mobile platform. Better and more responsive, not to mention cheaper, financial services for more individuals who live in remote areas around the world can radically reduce these individuals' uncertainty, risk and anxiety. It can also lead to greater equity and participation in the benefits of a regulated yet free market and (post) money economy.
And in ten years?
Pretty much the same. Some possible areas of work:- Social capital exchanges- Interactive television experiences- Cars as mobile media stations- Intelligent landscapes and geolocative services- Ungreenhousing technologies that are easier to use.