Movement does not necessarily equal life but it is a necessary component of existence. There is especially a key difference between technologies based on movement as an extension of a life in movement and technologies designed to collect people and move them to a specific platform and use entanglement strategies to keep the container full. So it is the implicit design which either determines if technology moves people or people move with technology.
Technology can easily change the meaning of the word mobility. The Oxford Dictionary defines mobility "as the ability to move or be moved freely and easily", but when we examine discussions of mobility as a technical rather than human thing, it is about a device capable of being a connecting point for uses that extend beyond the geography of people, i.e. how it can be used for extending work or new invasive techniques of marketing - many feature rich applications that move us well beyond the human definition of mobility.
Most criticism of technologies are when technologies move people, becoming either an extension of the work or marketing environment - and that is a throw back to an old age of master and slave. Mobile devices are inanimate objects but the masters in this case are those who look at the potential payload of being mobile and construct a new world in the form and function of the old.
Where technology is liberating is when it free's us up to be where we want to be. There is no master or special interest party in that equation, no overlord busily counting metrics, it is not technology designed on a historic philosophical basis, but designed as self-organizing and emergent. An emergent philosophy are the collection of choices that technology liberates in the present moment. It isn't a rear-view mirror, nor is it a pie-in-the-sky vision - it is movement.
While there are living things that don't move, there is a strong association between movement and quality of life - and this includes even those who are seeking to improve quality of life. There is no living movement in rituals and ingrained habits, and when mobility seeks to habituate, it is simply the past repeating itself with better toys. The reason there is life giving properties to movement is that in such actions there is a natural break from habit.
When one breaks out of a habit that provides no autonomic value, it is liberating - and thus when technologies enable this, those technologies can be viewed as liberating. So the technical design of mobility serves as great discussion point for engineering purposes, but that discussion is no different to the technical discussion architects that substituted architectural theory for unintended consequences, and simply because those architects never built their designs to human scale, but merely technical scale.
Mobility experts can learn from architectural experts in how great design should equate with quality of existence - and that one has to ensure that there is no narrowing of the definition of mobility now it has become a technical formation.
Designs that have unintended consequences is awful design - and thankfully design places greater emphasis on design thinking today. Moreover there are inspiration points between technical product design and the greater aesthetic, which is exactly what Steve Jobs loved about Jonathon Ives.
Even if one has great design, the education system cannot be a separate space or function, what design involves is the emergence of new ideas and ways - and mobility design should incorporate that wider ecosystem - it is not a life thing or an education thing that sits in the realm of the user, mobility is a whole system by itself.
Movement then is a crucial and core part of being moved (as in higher purpose) rather than being moved (as sheep). That is the defining axis of the 21st Century which serves us to look for new philosophies for the emerging age, rather than force-fit industrial age philosophies created for in relationship to an industrial age.
If we are tethered to our technologies because someone else owns our data, then it is the old way or old school still hard at work, but technologies that truly move us to a new point, where we can both make sense of the present and utilize it for a new tomorrow - and now that when we are being moved in a way that equates movement with life.
M.
