Altering the starting point of technology innovation

Technological designs, like all designs, carry with them implicit assumptions and values. Sometimes, by carefully unearthing and replacing these values new socio-technical possibilities emerge.

For example software programming tools assume that the programmer is using a PC or similar terminal. The huge number of people without access to a PC cannot thus be considered software programmers. In the developing world many such people do have access to a mobile phone, and so reimagining software programming languages and tools so that they run on a mobile phone gives rise to a new landscape of possibilities and challenges.

Similarly server architectures often rely on the fixed location of servers, or abstract their location entirely. If instead we treat the position of a server as relevant, and indeed reimagine server architectures where movement, flows, and dynamic spatial patternings are the norm, then not only would this make the technical infrastructure different in its affordances, but it might also allow non-technical components to act in that infrastructure: like the human who might convey servers when used as wearable devices.

Research Questions 

• Would a mobile server based network have to be designed around different architectural principals, ones that might for example require individual servers to act as holders of information that they can only exchange when they are in the appropriate locale?
• Would some of the services made possible by mobility be constrained by, and dependent upon, the emergence of ad hoc assemblies of servers? Would these assemblies be spatial, when a set of servers find themselves, albeit temporarily, in a particular geographic arrangement? Or would they be to do with the properties of transition states – such as when servers are moving together?
• Would mobility suggest a new concept for cloud computing, when the resource availability for either utility computing or more advanced ‘intelligent ’computing is only available in spatially or temporally fleeting opportunities? In this view, cloud computing would offer storm like functions.
• What implications derive from human agents acting as vehicles for servers?
• What happens when the location of the server matters? In this way mobility may mean that the location changes or is relevant to the location of the user, or it may mean that servers become fixed to locations of interest but don’t move.

Research Projects

Previous projects have included Glancephones, Grab & Share (trafficking) and Big Board 

• Services for Legs - Would human traffic forms dictate new service concepts?
• Monitoring for Connection- Micro payment systems for the use of mobile phones as ad hoc data gathering in developing world contexts where the micro payment does not entail cash but other forms of exchange, such as air time.
• M-programming - programming language for mobile phones. Mobile phones are typically treated as small or low power PCs. Most programming languages have been devised for the PC and it hardly surprising therefore that these languages rely on abstractions that are inappropriate for the mobile platform. For example, it is unlikely that mobile devices will be required to do large amounts of file processing, yet they need to cope with network connections that are intermittent. They are unlikely to need to render 3-dimensional data but will be required to aggregate multimedia data from multiple feeds. The challenge then is to design a scripting language that provides suitable abstractions for the mobile platform and can be programmed from the handset itself.
• What-ifs: Will I be able to ask questions of servers as if I were in a location? If servers reveal information dependent on where they are and who is near them, then I may want to formulate plans around the responses I might get were I to travel to a place. Indeed we might consider the service that a server provides as the mobile element, separated from but awake to the physical location of the servers it resides on.