About the Mobilities Lab
The mobilities.lab undertakes ethnographically informed, engaged research around contemporary mobilities. Projects are interdisciplinary and usually involve practitioners, policy-makers, and designers. They explore a diverse range of mobilities, including:
- studies of everyday decision making around short journeys in urban settings - Understanding Walking and Cycling;
- technologies and travel - Technologies and Travel Project
- the mobilisation of crisis response - Bridge Project
- mobile citizen engagement - CaTalyST (Citizens Transforming Society: Tools for Change)
- mobile entertainment and playful experiences - Mobile Radicals
- the flows of value, trust and reputation through innovative new media in the emerging digital economy;
- mobilising healthcare services - Design in Practice
- use of mobile technologies in public spaces - New Interaction Order Project
Our methods are mobile in two senses. On the one hand resarchers move with people, objects, information to empirically study the practical achievement of work, play, epistemic activities (e.g. through locative media, walk-alongs, drive alongs, mobile video ethnography). On the other, our methods seek to mobilise different perspectives and contributions to the research (e.g. through collaborative analysis and collaborative design). Methods are designed to enrich understanding of complex socio-technical phenomena and to practically inform policy, design, and socio-technical change. Members of the mobilities.lab have extensive experience in organizing and coordinating ethnographically informed design, future laboratories and living labs, and interdisciplinary, collaborative analysis is creatively facilitated in datasessions, ‘fieldstorms', workshops and collective experimentation events inside and outside the lab.
Mobilities.lab works in close collaboration with internal and external partners.
Internally, mobilities.lab is a collaboration between:
- Centre for Mobilities Research (based in the Department of Sociology)
- Imagination Lancaster (based in the Lancaster Institute for Contemporary Art)
- Computing, (based in Infolab21)
- Lancaster Environment Centre
The lab is also a hub for cross-disciplinary collaboration and R&D with external academic, public and industrial partners (e.g. Oxford University, Aarhus University, The UK Foresight programme, Saab, Thales). It includes collaborations with internationally recognized new media artists, including Drew Hemment and Jen Southern.
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