Portable Objects in Three Global Cities: The Personalization of Urban Places
Mizuko Ito, Daisuke Okabe, and Ken Anderson

- June 2007 DRAFT -
Forthcoming in Rich Ling and Scott Campbell Eds., The Mobile Communication Research Annual Volume 1: The Reconstruction of Space & Time through Mobile Communication Practices. Transaction Books.
Abstract
The mobile phone has become the central node of the ensemble of portable objects that urbanites carry with them as they negotiate their way through information-rich global cities. This paper reports on a study conducted in Tokyo, Los Angeles, and London where we tracked young professionals’ use of the portable objects. By examining devices such as music players, credit cards, transit cards, keys, and ID cards in addition to mobile phones, this study seeks to understand how portable devices construct and support an individual’s identity and activities, mediating relationships with people, places, and institutions. Portable informational objects reshape and personalize the affordances of urban space. Laptops transform cafés into personal offices. Reward and membership cards keep track of individuals’ use of urban services. Music players and mobile devices colonize the in-between times of waiting and transit with the logic of personal communications and media consumption. Our focus in this paper is not on the relational communication that has been the focus of most mobile communication studies, but rather on how portable devices mediate relationships to urban space and infrastructures. We identify three genres of presence in urban space that involve the combination of portable media devices, people, infrastructures, and locations: cocooning, camping, and footprinting. These place-making processes provide hints to how portable devices have reshaped the experience of space and time in global cities.
Introduction
Much of the public discourse and research on mobile media has focused on how they transcend the constraints of time and space, in the process often disrupting the integrity of face-to-face encounters and locations such as restaurants, movies, and public transportation. In addressing these issues, research has tended to focus on a specific device, the mobile phone, and on interpersonal communication as the primary mode of usage. While private communication on the mobile phone continues to be an important social and research site, in this paper we shift our focus towards mobile media that involves interfacing with particular locations and infrastructures. We examine not just the mobile phone, but the whole range of portable objects that people use to inhabit, navigate through, and interface with urban environments. This includes objects like media players, books, keys, credit and transit, ID, and member cards that comprise the information-based “mobile kits” of contemporary urbanites. By expanding the object of mobile media

studies to include this more diverse ensemble of portable informational objects, we seek to understand the diverse ways in which information and communication technologies shape our experience or urban space and time. The expanded focus also enables us to consider the convergence between objects like transactional cards, media players, and keys with the mobile phone or PDA.
This paper reports on a study conducted in three global cities—Tokyo, London, and Los Angeles—where we tracked young professionals’ use of portable objects. By examining the ensemble of objects in a mobile kit, this study seeks to understand how portable devices construct and support an individual’s identity and activities, mediating relationships with people, places, and institutions. By examining the use of portable objects for navigating, interfacing, and transacting with urban location and services, we shift our focus away from private, interpersonal communication towards more public, impersonal and instrumental kinds of social exchanges. What kinds of social and informational activities does an individual engage in when moving about different urban environments and between home and work? How do portable ICTs change how we occupy urban space and time? After first introducing our study and research approach, this paper discusses three ways of being present in urban space that involve the combination of portable media devices, people, infrastructures, and locations: cocooning, camping, and footprinting.
Research Framework
Our Study
The study reported on here was conducted as a collaborative effort between the Docomo House research lab at Keio University and the People and Practices group at Intel Research. Our goal was to document what people carried around with them in locations outside of the home and office, how these objects were used to for transactions and communication, and how they differ between different cities around the world. We were also interested exploring new methods for documenting practices that are very low-key, ongoing, and difficult to observe. All of these research objectives were extensions of our existing research in mobile communications, where we are seeking to understand how information and communication technologies are being integrated into ongoing, pervasive, everyday social interactions and transforming them in subtle ways.
The study centers on a diary-based methodology, adapted from the “communication diary” studies we have used to study mobile communication and camphone use (Grinter and Eldridge 2001; Ito and Okabe 2005; Okabe 2004). We adapted these methods to include a larger set of portable objects and to take into account the specificities of different urban contexts. For example, the record keeping via mobile text input which works well in the pedestrian context of Tokyo was not appropriate for the car-centered infrastructures of Los Angeles. Study participation took place in four stages:
1. An initial interview, including a survey of everything participants were carrying in their car, pockets, bags, wallets, etc.