Mobilities Design: Urban Designs for Mobile Situations

Contemporary society is marked and defined by the ways in which mobile goods, bodies, vehicles, objects, and data are organized, moved and staged. Against the background of the ‘mobilities turn’ this book articulates a new and emerging research field, namely that of ‘mobilities design’. The book revolves around the following research question: How are design decisions and interventions staging mobilities? It builds upon the ‘Staging Mobilities’ model (Jensen 2013) in an exploratory inquiry into the problems and potentials of the design of mobilities. The exchange value between mobilities and design research is twofold. To mobilities research this means getting closer to the ‘material’, and to engage in the creative, exploratory and experimental approaches of the design world which offer new potential for innovative research. Design research, on the other hand, might enter into a fruitful relationship with mobilities research, offering a relational and mobile design thinking and a valuable basis for design reflections around the ubiquitous structures, spaces and systems of mobilities.

Ole B. Jensen is Professor of Urban Theory at Department of Architecture, Design and Media Technology, Aalborg University, Denmark. He is BA in Political Science, MA in Sociology, PhD in Planning, and Dr. Techn. in Mobilities. He is the co-founder and a board member at the Center for Mobilities and Urban Studies (C-MUS), Aalborg University, as well as co-founder and coordinator of the Mobilities Design Group (MDG) at C-MUS. Ole B. Jensen´s main research interests are within Urban Mobilities, Urban Networked Technologies, and Mobilities Design. He is the co-author of Making European Space. Mobility, Power and Territorial Identity, Routledge, 2004 (with Tim Richardson), and the author of Staging Mobilities, Routledge, 2013 and Designing Mobilities, Aalborg University Press, 2014. Further he is the Editor of the four volume anthology ‘Mobilities’, Routledge, 2015.

Ditte Bendix Lanng is Assistant Professor in Urban Design at Department of Architecture, Design and Media Technology, Aalborg University, Denmark. She is an urban designer (Cand. polyt. Urban Design) with practical experience from architecture and city planning. She holds a PhD in the topic of mobilities design. Her research interests are within urban design and mobilities - a combination of fields that she approaches through cross-disciplinary theory, design experiments, ethnography, and as a collective enterprise with planning and architectural practice. She is co-founder and co-coordinator of the Mobilities Design Group (MDG) at Centre for Mobilities and Urban Studies (C-MUS).