A friend emailed this site of Laura Watt's through to me and I find it quite inspiring. It is site detailing a range of projects she has been working on in areas dealing with mobile communications and locative media, from an ethnographic point of view. The projects she as worked on are really intriguing and the website itself is set up in a way which keeps the user engaged.

The actual styles on each of the projects is quite different, but she hangs them together well with the kind of entry/ portal page into other aspects. Her phd was A Future Archaeology of the Mobile Telecoms Industry' at the Centre for Science Studies, Department of Sociology, Lancaster University. She has interesting methods, in particular, the idea of her pandora’s box of fragments relating to her work is a lovely one.

Beautiful design in the section on future achaeology

The section on Relocating Innovation is full of really interesting information and case studies which were done in Silicon Valley, the Orkney Islands and Hungary, which is a rather curious combination, but I know that sometimes these things come about through connections that one has in the communities. I really like the link with the Orkney Islands, and I think it is great that being “remote” doesn’t mean out of touch.

I use remote hesitantly, because as an Australian who has lived a third of my life in the UK nowhere feels remote to me anymore – I have been to Orkney and although not an easy hop, skip and jump from London (which is unfortunately where Britain’s navel seems to be, while Scotland gets forgotten), it is still is not as hard as some places, even in my home state of NSW to get to. I realise that British people have a much different perception of what is considered a long distance, and so respect that here, but I do feel it is a shame that many don’t explore the incredible variety of their amazing land a little more.

My home city of Sydney is now at almost 5 million people which makes it the most densely populated city in Australia. When I go back to visit, I feel it has grown too big in the past 10 years that I have been away. Too much traffic, too much smog, too many people, not enough green space, not enough time or headspace appreciate taking life slowly or on a local scale… How can you, when "local" covers 60km of coastline and an area of about 1,735 sq km?

I like the way that in Europe towns are much smaller and not so far from one another. There is not the same sense of utter isolation that you get in Australia when you are living in a rural community, which could be up to a day's drive away from the next one, with nothing at all in between. Such distances also mean that infrastructure such as decent analogue TV reception, digital TV, mobile reception and broadband can be very difficult to establish and maintain. Even dial-up internet is sometimes difficult to acquire, despite government initiatives like Networking the Nation, which didn't work for my father who lives in a rural but not remote (by Australian standards) location, who still has to use dial-up on a farm in a modest township of 600 people, only 500km west of Sydney because that is all he can get. There is no mobile reception, no digital/ cable TV and only 4 analogue and very fuzzy TV channels which are very reliant on the weather. Think how much worse it is in truly remote places, like the middle of the Nullabor in Australia's Red Centre!

In the UK & Europe, such issues are not hampered by vast tracts of unihabitable land across which intrastructure needs to be stretched for very small (so economically unviable) populations.  Here it is not far to another community or town, as little as 10 minutes drive, and rural living is less lonely and more sustainable on a psychological level than in Australia. The work being done in Orkney with the company Sand 14, which feeds into Laura Watt’s work gives me hope that perhaps companies like this, based on rich cultural heritage, innovation and technology may one day be viable in Australia ... How I would love to be properly able to do cutting edge research and innovation, back in Australia, but without having to be based in a large city.