From Freedom to Involvement: On the Rhetoric of Mobility in HCI Research

The concept of 'mobility' as it is conceptualized in mobile HCI is scrutinized in this paper. The currently applied understanding is often limited to perceiving mobility as corporeal and in spatial and temporal terms exclusively. While some have attempted to include contextual and social dimensions, their ways of approaching this issue seems problematic and in fact only continue a far-reaching separation between the physical and what is seen as the social or the subjective. These should however not be seen as disparate but rather as co-creators of what one perceives as 'reality'. The concept of involvement from phenomenology is introduced to discuss the possibilities of changing contexts to which use of mobile information technology gives rise. To conclude, we argue that mobile HCI needs to be thought of as designing for involvement in these diverse physio-social contexts, rather than as designing technology with a spatial and temporal location.