The Digital Ascetics

Transport and travel is opposed to residence and dwelling. In between these distinctions are a range of liminal exceptions that defy this dualism: sleeping rough, backpacking, caravanning, camping, sleeping in the car, renting, couch-surfing.

Those who travel continuously are considered outside of social normality: homeless, nomads, gypsies, and itinerant workers. As well, homelessness has historically been affiliated with divinity: Jesus, Buddha, and Confucius all lived without dwelling.

Yet, what has been termed a 'cult of less' now appears to transgress this basic building block of late modernity. BBC News 16 August 2010 In today's world property reflects the greatest status item and also the most expensive consumer item possible to own. It is also the storage centre for many of the other assets we cherish.

Yet, now many people who cannot afford to own a home and find that most of their assets are digital, are adopting a distinctly ascetic lifestyle that still conforms with society's expectations. These digital ascetics are not anti-consumerism nor anti-work like vagrant beat-poets such as Jack Kerouac. Instead, digital ascetics consider the modern ownership of physical objects as an obsolete practice in favour of 'superior' digital equivalents. Such a belief is naturally more mobile and demands more flexible quarters. For instance, Mark Boyle, the "man who lives without money" cannot live without his laptop nor his caravan. Guardian 9 November 2009 Interestingly, the number of caravan travellers rose significantly under New Labor in the UK. Daily Telegraph 22 August 2010

Combinations of homes and vehicles seems to be
a growing trend for the cult of less. For instance, the "bloggers ideal mode of transport" is little more than a rickshaw with an internet connection (more important than a toilet it seems) and a bed. Gizmodo 23 August 2010 The grander, more middle-class version of this is the Terreform Homeway - a huge house on tank treads that circulates never-ending highways. These mega-vehicles are a far cry from the asceticism of the cult of less! Either way, this version of dwelling pertains to a range of new values linked to digital technologies.

Cool Biz and Business Casual

While perhaps surprising to some proponents of formality at work, business fashion has changed over time quite remarkably. For example, in this Dutch painting from 1663 Governors Of The Wine Merchants Guild by Ferdinand Bol, important businessmen can be seen at work sporting long hair, beards, and more dramatically shorts and tights!

Nowadays shorts at work is considered a "career killer" even, confusingly, on casual Fridays according to Dana Casperson's Power Etiquette: What You Don't Know Can Kill Your Career 1999: 32. The distinction has led to a new oxymoron, 'Business Casual', being advocated by companies such as Deloitte. Yet, what is the cost of formality in terms of energy efficiency and travel work practices?

There are two major unintended consequences to business attire in the workplace. First, is the need for air-conditioning to support formal dress habits. Secondly, the emphasis on presentation and generally uncomfortable clothing - ties, high heels, and suits - leads to a preference for driving to work over cycling, walking, or even public transport.

Oddly it seems that climate has little to do with business attire. A recent poll Reuters 4 August 2010 has shown that chillier parts of Europe tend to dress less formally than India, Saudi Arabia, and Australia where full ties and suits for men are common even in temperatures over 30 degrees! It also seems that the more neo-liberal the country, the more inappropriate (or appropriate) the work attire: America and Great Britain both also see higher rates of formal dress.

To address these illogical practices Japan's Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi launched Cool Biz in 2005: a dressing down at work to match the climate rather than notions of cosmopolitanism. He took the extreme measure of setting government office air conditioners at 28C, thereby forcing changes in dress. Many companies in the private sector have refused to comply, despite the policy impacting on energy companies' profits by 175 million. Bloomburg 16 October 2005

Some workers have responded to the policy by stripping down to their underwear to cool down: research by Shinichi Tanabe, a professor of Architecture and Environmental Engineering at Tokyo’s Waseda University, claims that each degree the temperature is raised above 25 degrees cuts worker productivity by 1.9 percent. Bloomburg 23 July 2009 Perhaps businesses could do more than supply air conditioning to make their workers comfortable: recently, the Japanese Labour Standards Office confirmed that a young Chinese office worker, Jiang Xiao Dong at Fuji Electric Industries, was yet another victim of "karoshi" or death from overwork! New Zealand Herald August 14, 2010

As companies are increasingly forced to cost their carbon emissions the simple fix championed by Koizumi might have an incredible impact on how people not only dress for business but also how they commute.

The Creeping Automatization of Shopping

Across the world over the last couple of years a silent revolution in shopping has been rolled out. While scanners, universal bar-codes, scales, and electronic tills are all part of the everyday landscape of the store, the completely automated store checkout - a service entirely devoid of human intervention - has so far only been a science fiction concept.

Self-service machines are now prolific in our everyday lives in ticketing, libraries, vending, banking; even toilets now offer automated services. But the supermarket checkout has had an almost symbolic sanctity.

Many of the issues in the auto-checkout stem not from the technology, but rather the social aspects of interaction, practices, and everyday life. Auto-checkouts require patience, precision, and tolerance - traits that only some shoppers appear to nurture. Guardian 23 August 2010 They also remove the conveniences of bulk buying. Negative perceptions of auto-checkouts are vague and nondescript - often just a general sense of 'frustration'. Telegraph 22 August 2010 Some users even feel 'bullied' by the machines! Telegraph 24 August 2010

What has been termed a 'revolution' at the tills Independent 23 August 2010 is hardly new technology. Entirely automated factories have been possible for decades. In 1932 a Harvard business student, Wallace Flint, submitted his masters thesis proposing an automated grocery store using punch cards. The idea of 'robot retailing' was discussed throughout the 1950s. The Billboard 18 October 1952 In 1950 Edward Benjamin Weiss claimed that "The day of robot retailing is here"! Business and Economics 1950: 146 Similarly, Jeremy Rifkin in The End of Work (1995) highlighted the threat of automation to jobs in the service sector.

But the current determination of supermarket chains to adopt the technology could precipitate a less obvious revolution in how stores operate. By removing the human interactions that users value, stores might force users into online e-shopping alternatives, thereby reducing shopping-related traffic. Like banks with ATMs, automation might be a precursor to reducing the number of available human tellers, thereby giving clients no choice but to self-checkout. Facing the burden of large amounts of self-service, the convenience of the supermarket is reduced and thus the attraction of weekly shopping trips.

The Affects of 3D Printing On Travel Behaviours

Many of us have sought to cut down on printing in order to preserve paper. But now MakerBot Industries have introduced the 3D printer that prints objects from base materials. It now seems that one possible future scenario in retail is decentralized manufacturing: 'off-grid' DIY consumer product creation. Get to the Future 17 August 2010 The futuristic vision of consumption is vastly at odds with how shopping is currently imagined by most retailers: consumers travel to product-hubs (malls, shopping squares, city centres), often by car, and then purchase stocked goods and take them home with them.

But small-scale decentralized manufacturing has much in common with current e-shopping practices: a product is ordered online and then delivered by mail (inevitably when you're not at home, leading to a further step of travelling to the central post-repository to collect the item, often by car). But with 3D printing the user merely downloads a template, adds the base materials to the printer, and lo and behold a product is born! No waiting and crucially no travel, until you need to stock up on base materials.

The model of business has obvious attractions for flat-pack retailers like Ikea - it seems a natural progression for their business model. But Ikea are now seeking to take the technology one step further by promoting a 3D food printer or 'Cornucopia Digital Fabricator'. Shiny Shiny 12 August 2010 The device mixes food canisters to create "the creation of flavors and textures that would be completely unimaginable through other cooking techniques". Soylent Green anyone? Of course, the idea of mixing components to make food for space travel has already been become a trope in science fiction movies such as 2001: A Space Odyssey.

It remains to be seen how off-grid food and product generation affect travel. A whole gamut of possible impacts can be imagined, from a reduction in leisure-shopping trips; reduced, or standardized, freight and cargo deliveries; and of course no more weekly shopping trips.

Will Jelly! Kill the Office Party?

Once upon a time, or so the story goes, everyone worked in offices from 9-5. If you stayed in the same organization long enough; were punctual, well-dressed, and polite; and you worked hard, you would eventually get promoted to the top tier of management.

Then things became a lot more fluid. Suddenly, people were moving jobs - a lot. Workers were rewarded not for loyalty, but for experience. Suddenly work could be outsourced, or better cheaper talent could be parachuted in. It suddenly became much harder and more competitive to rise to the top and, as a response, organizations formalized the processes of promotion and the management of work performance in the form of human resources. In order to do this a whole range of tiers were introduced and many more middle and sub management positions. While this meant that workers could be easily rewarded by being promoted quicker, it also led to vastly increased scrutiny and much less trust on the coal-face.

Thus, alongside this managerization of the workforce came a widespread trend for workers to leave their jobs, but retain their contacts and clients. Enabled by new technologies and greater connectivity contracting became a viable and respectable alternative to the rat-race. By starting their own businesses and becoming their own bosses, workers could remove accountability, scrutiny, and particularly managers from the equation. Instead contractors dealt with clients. If something goes wrong, the contractor simply finishes the contract and moves on. Job done. Sometimes workers can even be rehired on a contract by the companies they previously worked for!

Contractors are often managed by trust and thus stand at arm's length to organizational processes and governance. They also manage their own resources and usually office times and spaces. Flexibility in the form of contracting and even sub-contracting is now the norm in many organizations. As Janine Wedel describes in her book Shadow Elite (2009) "Flexians" pervade the private and public sectors. Oddly, this has achieved something, rather covertly, that many commentators have repeatedly asserted was a myth: a trend towards the remote, flexible, virtual workplace.

In the ICT sector, where this phenomenon has boomed, casual coworking, or Jelly!, has arisen to provide the large number of contracting self-employed a place to work. Jelly! was founded by Amit Gupta and Luke Crawford in New York in February 2006. Urban Omnibus 3 June 2009 These stripped-down casual coworking groups bear more resemblance to conferences or internet cafes than offices and offer collaboration, resources, colleagues, and coffee, but crucially no managers and no attachments.

Is Jelly! the future of the office? Will this new form of office-culture, pushed by practices as well as new technologies, impact upon the holy grail of transport planning - the commute? Is Jelly! the painless office party?

Changing Mobility Baselines: The iWallet

The wallet is one of a number of core mobility baselines. How important is it to travel? Anyone who has lost or forgotten theirs will know that not having one makes access to all transport except walking and cycling impossible. Transport planning generally assumes that this base level barely shifts. But in fact, wallets have been following their own trends in relation to social needs.

Who invented the wallet? Wallets, or money purses, have been around since the invention of coinage. Take, for example, this stunning 6th or 7th century Anglo-Saxon purse from the Sutton Hoo burial: Frank N Minetti of Cincinnati, Ohio is certainly a contender for the invention of the modern wallet. In 1928 he filed a patent for a 'pocket wallet' US Patent 1699,064 8 May 1928:

"The objects of my invention are to provide an efficient, practical and highly desirable and serviceable Pocket Wallet capable of receiving various articles such as bank 10 notes, a bank book, a check book, personal and business cards, stamps, small change etc."

Minetti had invented the swiss-army knife of purses, sporting compartments for all imaginable social practices:

"Not infrequently considerable embarrassment is caused an individual who unintentionally issues a bank check when having insufficient funds in the bank to guarantee payment of the amount of money specified on the check and so which embarrassment may be avoided by the proper application and use of my invention".

Modern expressions of the mobility baseline are much more novel. take, for instance, the bacon, toast, and cassette wallet Oddee 24 March 2009. Many who hate carrying a large wallet can opt for the Jimi or even the recycled bicycle spoke clip.

Now Apple are aiming to co-opt the wallet with projections of their iPhone 5. If all goes to plan the iWallet will replace all of the functions of the contemporary wallet. To do this Apple would need to make the contents obsolete. Computerworld 4 May 2010 The success of the iWallet would hinge on secure near-field technology that would allow a transaction to be made through the phone as a paperless, and crucially, cardless payment. It would effectively render not only cards but ATMs and (in the long run) paper and metal coinage redundant. A tall order indeed! While many of the compartments that Frank Minetti imagined for his patent have been rendered obsolete (bank cheques, bank books, cheque books) others remain stubbornly current, even though alternatives are available (stamps, business cards). The iPhone-as-payment-system would obviously be a paradigm shift for the wallet as well as for commerce and for transport.

The Unintended Consequences of Mobility Scooters

Images of travel in the future often appear stream-lined, faultless, and automated. For instance, in many science fiction genres (vintage Dan Dare for instance) the future is a carefully orchestrated world of personal light vehicles guided through high-tech byways. London Heathrow's new guided taxis certainly give the impression that the airport works like an automated machine, despite the cars being described as 'creepy' by users. Fast Company 12 August 2009

But another form of light, personal urban transport out in the 'real world' continues to expose the inconsistencies, inconveniences, dangers, and obstacles that make up our usual experiences of travel. In 2007 a 90 year-old pensioner was caught on the M27 motorway in his mobility scooter, oblivious to the lorries and coaches roaring past him at 70mph. Daily Mail 12 June 2007 In 2009 an 89 year old man was stopped on the M20 in similar circumstances. Telegraph 23 April 2009 And this month a pensioner in a wheelchair was escorted by police off the A23 Südost-Tangente motorway in Europe. Austrian Independent 05 August 2010

The laws governing the use of mobility scooters are vague and expose the dangers inherent in transport infrastructure. Many mobility scooter users frequently ride on the road to avoid uneven pavements that can throw the occupants. Evening News 17 August 2010 Users who are forced onto roads are more likely to be noticed as a problem by other road-users. As with pedestrians and cyclists it is assumed that cars and other vehicles have right of passage. One article has described "drunk" and "drug-driving" pensioners on mobility scooters as a "menace to society"! Daily Mail 13 August 2010

As society ages and the numbers of pensioners increases (a French poll recently identified the typical British man as wearing a flat cap and riding a mobility scooter Telegraph 5 August 2010), it can be expected that personal light vehicles will come into direct competition with conventional road-users. Rethinking how these vehicles (along with bicycles and other light transport) might be integrated into other forms of public transport such as trams might be a good start to addressing the dangers and obstacles in our travel experiences. BBC News 27 July 2010

Refrigerator 2.0 to Impact on Travel Habits?

Before freezers shopping was enacted on a daily, rather than weekly, basis. Local, specialist suppliers (butcher, baker, candlestick maker) provided for local people who cycled or walked to the shops. Food was stored and kept cool in pantries and cellars. Meat was smoked and fruit and vegetables were preserved or made into alcohol.

Yet, the home freezer changed all that. With the freezer came vast sub and ex-urban supermarkets away from the centres of towns and cities. Trips in cars to stock up a week's supply of food became the norm. The altered land-use and travel practices of the refrigerator have been well-documented, but is this all about to change?

Two crises, the world's growing population and fossil-fuel dependency, are being reported as inciting a spate of new inventions around food storage and collection. Guardian 12 August 2010 One, the Hyundai Nano Garden, is essentially a fridge that grows as well as stores food, eliminating the need for shopping. If this notion of a fridge that grows its own food could be extended to in-vitro meat production Telegraph 16 August 2010, now being touted as a major solution to growing demand by experts such as John Beddington, the UK government's chief scientist then large-scale shifts in food practices could indeed take place oriented around micro-farming rather than travel.

Decabinized Travel

A century ago a lot of travel was conducted in demarcated cabins, carriages, or compartments. It was cabinized for comfort, hygiene, and privacy. Uncomfortable situations would be restricted to only a handful of people (Alice only had to contend with a man in a paper hat), rather than the scrums we have grown used to on urban metros.

Nowadays 'open-plan' is the model of choice in offices, shops, hospitals, and of course in transport design. Travel on trains, planes, and even in coaches is mostly demarcated into three open-plan groups: first class, business (second) class, and economy (third class). Open-plan is great for security, surveillance, collecting tickets, serving refreshments, and of course for increasing space and thus profits (often at the cost of comfort and convenience).

Yet, an unintended consequence of this open-plan culture is a greater exposure to disease. A popular meme in the media is the idea of the 'end of antibiotics': a new class of penicillin-resistant super-bugs threatens to converge on society. This begs the question, do open-plan spaces have to be revised in light of this threat? Guardian 12 August 2010

How might this revolution in transport space play out in terms of design? It might be anticipated that the sorts of broad restrictions on free movement seen in recent epidemics could push a rethink on open-plan spaces. Blanket measures might include a total lock-down of travel or phased restrictions on movement. Maybe open-plan will prove to be a passing fad and cabinized travel will make a comeback?

Travel Agents and Guides

It appears two staples of leisure travel, the travel agent and the travel guide tome, are threatened by new smart-phone apps. Apple has been reported to have filed three patents for apps that allow the user to make reservations, create an itinerary, and view airport guides and information all from a smart-phone. NDTV 10 August 2010

While it is unclear how much travel agents have accommodated new technologies into their business models, travel agents are becoming more vulnerable. Two of the most well-known agents in the UK - Tui Travel and Thomas Cook - both downgraded profit forecasts after a dramatic slowdown in business this year. The downgrade has been attributed to the volcanic ash-cloud as well as the rising interest in staycations due to job insecurities. Guardian 11 August 2010

Meanwhile, the era of lugging a heavy travel guide appears to be threatened by the trend of ebooks. Guides by Lonely Planet, Rough Guide, Time Out, Frommer's, and Fodor's are all now available through sellers such as Amazon, Barnes & Noble and iTunes. TravPR 11 August 2010

Does this mean no more arm-ache on the road? As long as power-points are available to charge devices. One side-effect of the increasing reliance on portable devices is a dramatic rise in lost power-chargers at hotels. Last year, the Fairmont Waterfront in Vancouver used its huge stash of forgotten chargers as Christmas decorations! Wall Street Journal 7 August 2010

Wearable CCTV

The next stage in surveillance technologies are wearable devices. While CCTV has become an omnipresent fixture in British society, the new generation of surveillance technologies will be sported on police helmets; in lanyards; and even embedded in uniforms. But what are the legalities of this practice? Officers on Glasgow's subway system will now see their recordings used as evidence in court, perhaps paving the way for a wider roll-out of this wearable technology in a move to document crime as it happens on the body. Thus we can expect a slew of new reality TV shows showing crime in an even more intimate fashion.

BBC News 9 April 2010