Mobile Media for Heterogeneous Interaction Landscapes - Towards Integrated Liquid Media Ojects

Traditionally, media objects have been restrained to specific media containers (e.g. media players, libraries, and technological platforms). In this paper we argue that this is due to a tradition of treating media as content separated from, but physically aligned to a certain form. However, due to the digital character of modern media, and due to current developments towards file sharing communities, media convergence and cross-media interaction design we argue that there are several good reasons now for exploring the design space beyond a container view of media. In our exploration of this design space we take a point of departure in media objects where form and content is integrated, instead of separated and we take contemporary theories of liquidity and an innovation-oriented focus group study as two sources of inspiration for exploring the design space of truly liquid media. The exploration is then summarized into a vision of midget design, i.e. design of small, lightweight, interactive and integrated media objects that can live across heterogeneous media platforms.