Excerpt for the networkedbook chapter on the stress of travel. When designing for mobility, architect and designers should take stress into account:
Travel is stressful because of the many “losses” that travel entails: loss of time (when missing a connection), loss of integrity (at checkpoints, or when a suitcase has been “visited”), loss of a piece of belonging (an item forgotten in a train, a piece of luggage missing), loss of orientation (within terminals and upon arrival in the host country), loss of identity (endorsing the identity of a “wealthy” tourist when a “Westerner” travels in developing countries), loss of family connections, loss of home (literally when fleeing a disaster zone), etc. Some types of stress aren’t as major as others, but the stress of travel builds-up over time. Related to the consequences of stress, Lehrer reports that:
While stress doesn’t cause any single disease — in fact, the causal link between stress and ulcers has been largely disproved — it makes more diseases significantly worse. […] In fact numerous studies in developed countries have found that psychosocial factors such as stress are the single most important variable in determining the length of a life. […] The emergence of stress as a major risk factor is [also] largely a testament to scientific progress: the deadliest diseases of the 21st century are those in which damage also accumulates steadily over time. (Sapolsky refers to this as “luxury of slowly falling apart.”) Unfortunately this is precisely the sort of damage that’s exacerbated by emotional stress. […] The power of this new view of stress — that our physical health is strongly linked to our emotional state — is that it connects a wide range of scientific observations, from the sociological to the molecular. On one hand, stress can be described as a cultural condition, a byproduct of a society that leaves some people in a permanent state of unease. But that feeling can also be measured in the blood and urine, quantified in terms of glucocorticoids and norepinephrine and adrenal hormones. And now we can see with scary precision, the devastating cascade unleashed by these chemicals. The end result is that stress is finally being recognized as a critical risk factor, predicting an even larger percentage of health outcomes.” (Lehrer, 2010: 132 – 133)[i]
By highlighting that travel is a factor of stress (and that stress is harmful), I intend to call attention to the fact that design and technologies associated with travel are essentially meant to bring comfort, and to soothe anxieties due to mobility. While many design strategies soothe the physical discomfort of for example having to transport bulky items, others also tackle purposefully or not our emotions. As an answer to the needs for portability, flexibility and adaptability, designers have been creating objects that can be (dis)assembled, transported, (un)folded, combined, adapted, worn and carried (Vitra organized a traveling exhibit displaying a range of artifacts in the above order).[ii] Designers have also experimented with the flexibility of the architectural program. In retrospective, Touch·Sensitive, the experiment Vaucelle and I conducted in 2007 was an attempt at creating a wearable that would operate on the mind by massaging the body while on the move, helping people to relax if not attain a state of bliss. (Vaucelle – Abbas, 2007).[iii] We now design “experiences”. Making a hotel feel “like home” is a strategy well developed by hotel chains. For example, at the Hotel Concorde in Frankfurt, you can spatially appropriate your hotel room by changing the lighting scheme, thus the “mood” of your assigned (and paid-for) space. (You also participate in changing the hotel’s external appearance, because the variable lighting is visible through the window as the light fixture is located nearby.) On its website, the hotel even advertises along with the “Internet access” and the “Cable pay-TV” the “colour adjustable illumination.”[iv] As Judy A. Siguaw and Cathy A. Enz write: “What better way to welcome guests than by providing a physical environment in which they can feel comfortable, secure, and relaxed — in short, ‘at home.’”[v] However, generally the frequent traveler claims to “be at home anywhere,” a slogan promoted by ads for portable devices. So why do we need all this artifice? To create the simulacrum of home, to sooth the stress related to traveling constantly (Abbas, 2006).
Stresses due to travel occur at all times, before, during and after a physical move, whether in the time spent going to the airport, at check-in and during the flight (Bellanger, 1997), or even on the scale of a lifetime, when one moves from location to location.[vi] This is also because mobility is multiple, physical, mental (cultural displacements) and digital. The moments of transition, moments of adjustment, are those that design, technologies and services try to smooth out. Moreover, these moments of transition and adaptation exist because neo-nomads do not carry their entire living environment with them, just what they need to “survive,” a piece of the puzzle of “home” to connect to hosts along their way. Moving about appears like a continuous process made of discontinuities (almost like the digital).
[i] Lehrer, J. “Stress Doesn’t Kill Us — but it makes everything that does kill us much worse. Inside the search for a cure” in Wired, August 2010: pp. 130 – 137 and 146.
[ii] Mathias Schwartz-Clauss and Alexander von Vegesack, eds., Living in Motion: Design and Architecture for Flexible Dwelling (Weil am Rhein: Vitra Design Stiftung gGmbH, 2002)
[iii] Cati Vaucelle, Yasmine Abbas, Touch: sensitive apparel, CHI ‘07 extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems, April 28-May 03, 2007, San Jose, CA, USA
[iv] http://www.hotelconcorde.de/
[v] Judy A. Siguaw and Cathy A. Enz, “Best Practices in Hotel Architecture,” Cornell Hotel Restaurant Administration Quaterly (1999): 44-49; p. 44
[vi] Bellanger, F. and Devos, M. Planète Nomade : Les Modes de Vie du Passager Aérien (Paris: L’Aube, 1997)
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