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Reconstruction 6 by Ethnographer
I was back inside Blue, and I was worried.
I felt I understood the ubiquitous city of the industry, as it was made at the GSM World Congress in Super-Cannes; knew how so much labour, including my own, was necessarily invisible so that this anyone anywhere anytime future manifest as a seamless, magical experience – a heterotopia. Yet, inside Blue was inside a site that designed this future, gave it form in products and strategies. Blue was where this ubiquitous city was being made, flowing out of its organisational structures, processes, and landscapes into the rest of the industry. What worried me was that, as I sat at my little anaemic grey desk-pod in the design studio, this ubiquity-making should be going on all around me.
I needed to listen more, listen and watch the designers as they went about their work of negotiating marketing specifications, engineering requirements, material limitations, injection moulds, corporate strategies, management coercion, formal design processes, and much else into a shape, a contingent shape, but a shape that contained a future device. I needed to understand if and how ubiquity got done, and re-done, how it was stabilised as a future; and I also needed to understand if and how the landscapes of this city, the civilised parklands of the industry, effected this work.
Thankfully, this week was a good time for such worries, for there had been a recent convulsion in the future strategy of the company (an effect of falling share prices, I was told) and a new product concept was needed to meet the revised strategy. I had been invited to sit-in on a two day workshop by the ‘camera’ team, the group of designers who specialised in devices with a video camera built-in. The first workshop, tomorrow, was to be a team ‘away day’ at a small rural hotel in Oxfordshire for them to talk through their strategy. The day after