The global implications of mobile technologies are profound. Mobile media and wireless technologies are "fast technologies" overwhelmingly dominated by the primacy of commerce, speed, innovation, and technological progress, and encounter the potential for a massive paradigm shift when confronted with Slow Design methodologies. "Slow Mobility" is a new ART Mobile Lab research direction - one that views mobile technologies as species of designed material and media interventions which today exert expressions and impacts within virtually all global environments, as an integrated part of the planet's complex ecologies. Thus, multiple disciplinary perspectives and methodologies are required to reflect upon how mobility shapes and is shaped by environmental and social relations, and to create and evaluate designs for mobility that address core concerns like eco-sustainability, temporal diversity, and well-being.

At its core, Slow Mobility is a new program for the experimental design of new mobile media interactions and environments. This thematic will explore the potential application and evolution of holistic "slow design" concepts and methodologies within the field of mobile media interaction and design research, an area in which slow design principles have not been applied consistently before. The purpose is to define, test and evaluate new mobile media designs aimed at environmental sustainability, socio-cultural well-being, and "temporal diversity". Specifically, new approaches are sought for the "slow" and "open" design of solutions to specific real-world social and environmental challenges in which mobile technology is implicated. The research will examine how "slow" concepts and methods can translate into new configurations of mobile interaction, new "media ecologies" involving people, environments, and mobile technologies, with a view to balancing socio-cultural and individual needs with the well-being of the environment in the context of mobile media use. The wider objective of this research is to prototype a conceptual road map and methodology for creating and studying mobile media designs, interactions and objects that evolve new interactive configurations, social and environmental designs, and ultimately new media/time ecologies based on slow principles and theories of temporal ecology.