Travel Archives - Near Future Laboratory

A curious interoperability protocol, wherein the address for some weird place in Seoul has been found on an iPhone and must now be entered into the GPS of the taxi. A simple affair, with minimal bumps often enough, particularly because the map on the iPhone shows the address and streets in Korean, which is great for the taxi cab driver, but miserable for the the traveler who can only hope that the locale on the map is actually where he would like to be.

Why do I blog this? This are useful moments to capture, where language, culture, objects, data come into conflict and must work their way around one another. I am told the iPhone isn’t available in South Korea at the time of this photo, so you have this foreign object — one that is probably quite legible as the iPod Touch was spotted around the city — and a baroque assemblage of devices, machines, transaction mechanisms, remote controls, identity stickers, car controls, radios, etc. I would have to contrast this with the notion of seamless perfection and interoperability that is often the image of the future transportation dashboard.
Continue reading Interoperability

I’m generally not a rush-rush guy when it comes to airline travel. If find it useful to take a bit of a time buffer between deplaning and entering the real-world of transfers, taxis, trains, learning to negotiate maps, figuring out where the hotel is, sorting my head out, and to shake off the stiffness of barely human conditions of international travel. So I generally check my bag. I’ve been lucky over the years, only had one rather epic mis-routing of luggage. There comes a time though when the ratio of travel time to luggage retrieval enters the realm of the absurd. Here in CPH, after an hour and change flight from Berlin, a good 30 minutes was spent waiting. Waiting. Waiting. If memory serves, during the last trip they finally just brought the luggage trailing on the flatbed carts you normally only see out on the tarmac. Just drove the tractors in, leaving everyone to climb over things and grab their bag off the cart.

Fortunately the time was well spent having a conversation on the consequences of global connections — what would the world be like if the next billion people were connected? — with my friend Noel Hidalgo (just off his Luck of the Seven round-the-world-for-free-culture trip and a tour of duty trying out being a NYC Cabbie, which might explain the Kangol), who happened to be on the same flight.
Continue reading Time Spent, Well