Running and Grimacing: The Struggle for Balance in Mobile Work

Abstract

This paper draws on recent ethnographic fieldwork projects among mobile professionals in three overlapping settings: in the midst of inter-city business travel; conducting work while roaming within a more restricted urban or rural periphery; and within the confines of a single plant or office building. Spanning all these situations were a set of tensions that characterize much of mobile work. These included the desire of mobile professionals to maintain contact and a sense of awareness of the work of their colleagues, while at the same time avoiding both constant interruptions and scrutiny by others; navigating a complex relationship among “bits”, “atoms” and more ephemeral phenomena, such as spoken conversations, while avoiding the burden of too much distracting “stuff”; the desire for “appliance-like” devices which are intuitive both in purpose and interface, with the desire to avoid the many costs of purchasing, carrying and using a variety of devices. Underlying all these tensions is a fundamental contradiction which has yet to be fully addressed either in the literature or the design of mobility: the need to harmonize “what is here” with “what is not” – that is, to reconcile the fact that one occupies a given physical space at a particular time with the fact that many new technologies are designed precisely to separate work activities from dependence on time and place. The implications of these tensions are explored in the conclusion.