Project Proposal: Mobility and the Wireless Office Culture.

"In the age of information, it is information itself that becomes environmental."

- Marshall McLuhan

"We are becoming less like Saint Jerome, immobilized in his study among his accumulated possessions, less like Dilbert stuck at his computer in his cubicle, and more like cyborg foragers navigating through electronically mediated resource fields. We are relying less upon things (or people) being at fixed locations, or available on regular schedules, and more upon electronic tracking and navigation to locate what we want and take us to it. Our mental maps of buildings and cities are becoming less static records of fixed features and more dynamic representations of current conditions."

- William Mitchell, Me++: The cyborg self and the networked city.

The issue between contemporary developments in information technology and its possible implications in architecture/urban design would form the investigation inquiry in this project proposal for the final year.

Specific attention would be given to the cultural implications of wireless networked technology (WiFi, 3G, Bluetooth) and portable devices (netbooks, iPhones, Blackberry). An investigation into the concept of network (spatial or organisational?), would be formed via the use of Geospatial Information Systems and less conventional methods such as web-crawling and spidering. There is a possibility of re-imagining architecture in a digitally assisted augmented state, separate from cartesian rules of functional proximity and hierarchy.