The ART Mobile Lab aspires to be an interdisciplinary and holistic design environment, so we try not to succumb too much to the limitations of discipline or genre boundaries. We're always open to new ideas, approaches, methodologies, and concerns. However, our current design interests and activities generally fall within some identifiable domains:

Mobile Media
Call it portable, handheld, ubiquitous, locative, wireless, pervasive or "everyware", we work mainly with mobile technology. Currently 94% of the "Internet Generation" own a mobile phone, and 80% of all US citizens have one. As Wikipedia says (at least, it did when we wrote this), Mobile phones, digital cameras, ipods, laptops, PDA, Game Boys and so on consume much of our daily lives. Whether we're doing software development, interaction design, rapid prototyping, content creation, or navel-gazing, they pretty much consume ours.

Locative Media
Our work with location-based media ranges from creating and testing new experience designs and interaction designs (such as the Minimal Attention User Interface developed for Tracklines), to exploring place-based storytelling and thinking about the emerging collision between new media and older place-based ways of knowing. After all, "locative media" is really nothing new. It's as old as the hills. In fact, place-based storytelling is probably one of the oldest forms of media there is. New developments in the fields of mobile computing are providing new possibilities that embed memory in sensors, garments, buildings, and entire geographic environments. At the same time, we recognize that people have always told stories, sung songs, made maps, left markers, and otherwise rooted aspects of their culture securely in "place". In a sense, GPS and other locative technologies bring us full circle, compelling us to re-explore place-based modes of knowledge, experience, communication and interaction with a new kind of digital mediation layered on top. Because of this, they present an opportunity to explore the very old relationships between landscape and memory, place and culture, imagination and sensory experience, in exciting new ways.

Temporal Design / Slow Design
Design methodologies incorporating critiques of "speed" and the analysis and renegotiation of time in everyday life, including "Slow Design" and "Slow Technology", and conceptual approaches such as time ecology, temporal diversity, Lefebvre's rhythmanalysis, and of course "slowness."

Sustainable Design
Design for Sustainability (DfS) signifies a family of environmental design methodologies for physical or social intervention in natural, human or built environments focused on "survival" needs including physical environmental impacts and human health, tangible media ecologies, and design that acknowledges the time frames of natural processes.

Design for Well-being
Design for Socio-cultural Well-being signifies environmental design methods focused on needs related to personal-fulfillment, quality of life, psychological health, mental environments and media ecologies. Example methodologies include Human Needs and Human-scale Development, Design for Need, Design for Society; user-centered design.

Open Design
"Open Design" refers to principles of collaborative design, networking and knowledge sharing that circumvent the constraints of commercial economic models, derived originally from the open source movement and evolved as a framework for trans-disciplinary civic engagement, mainly for supporting projects focused on developing local solutions to real needs and challenges affecting the common good, while helping transfer these solutions to wider contexts via the same collaborative networks.