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Mobile Identities

My colleague and Tokyo design studio neighbour Younghee Jung wrote about the South Korean practice of sticking a mobile phone number to car windshields in the event the car is an obstruction and the owner needs to be contacted. These are not one-off hand-written notes but formal stickers. More on Younghee's site here.

It's an interesting and common example of the trade-off between convenience in this instance mostly for the benefit of others and giving up information that some people consider to be private. But are users really forgoing privacy? To what extent are South Korean consumers likely to own multiple devices, are mobile phone numbers already 'public knowledge' or are they likely to channel more private communication through other means?

The practice points to a newish kind of service - where an identity is specifically set up for communication relating to a particular task or purpose in some cases filtered by intermediaries before being forwarded to you. It's a common enough practice with email accounts but, largely because of one to one relationship between phone and phone number, its less common for mobile phones.

In a future perfect world of ubiquitous location awareness, how likely is it that the future social norm will include revealing some level of the owners current proximity, me here now, writ large on your windshield? And of course in what contexts, with what level of granularity? How does this scenario play out with vehicles with a degree of autonomous mobility - for starters cars that are capable of parking themselves? And given the communication that can happen between vehicles, their owners, their proxies and the urban environment who will offer the future service of calculating your route from A to B and i.e. getting other vehicles to move out the way, all happening prior to you stepping into the car?

Transactions and intermediaries, so yeah what kind of new hustles does it enable?

Sort of related: mobile identities from Ho Chi Minh City, Uganda and beyond and specifically dual SIM card supporting phones and hacks.

Both photos byYounghee.

Writing from Tokyo | March 25, 2008 | Permalink