...your cell phone is a broadband browser, a smart wallet, and a passport to the wireless community of the future. And your fellow citizens are the content, 24 hours a day.
Jari Mielonen and his colleagues have a motto: Sanoista tekoihin, which loosely translates to "Don't talk - make it happen." Mielonen is CTO of Sonera, Finland's leading telecommunications company and one of Europe's most aggressive players in the wireless market. "Everyone's been talking about possibilities," he says. "Nobody's been saying, 'This is it. Touch and feel. Try it!'"
That's why he and a group of businesspeople, academics, and city planners are collaborating to turn a new development on the tussocky shore of the Gulf of Finland into the world's first wireless community. It's a simple but intriguing idea: Give the workers and residents of a new Helsinki suburb a state-of-the-art wireless infrastructure and the very latest wireless services; to log on, locals won't even need a PC - just a cell phone. Then stand back and watch how the info-age town of the future actually functions.
The site, known as Arabianranta (Arabia shore), is a flat, windswept, mostly barren expanse named for the pottery works that once stood there. Even before Mielonen and his colleagues started hatching plans to turn the area into a wireless wonderland, it had been earmarked by the city of Helsinki for development as a tech hub. If all goes as planned, by 2010 the location will be home to about 12,000 residents and 700 IT companies with some 8,000 employees, along with 4,000 students enrolled at local universities. It will also be home to a real-world experiment in community networking that will untangle some of the most pressing questions about the social effects of pervasive connectivity. Will the constant availability of wireless connection make communities more cohesive, or more isolated? How will people balance privacy concerns with the obvious advantages of extended wireless reach? And how much connectivity - once it becomes the status quo - will people really want?
Construction has already begun on the first wave of new office buildings and homes, which should be completed this summer. Alongside the concrete and steel pilings, another, less visible, framework is being built here by Sonera and its partners - IBM, local software producer Digia, and the European-based Symbian Alliance, a joint effort involving Ericsson, Motorola, Nokia, Matsushita, and Psion. They are creating what they call Helsinki Virtual Village, a wireless interactive community for the entire suburb of Arabianranta. HVV will include a local area network and a wide range of services available through broadband fiber-optic cable and wireless links, which will be accessible anytime, anywhere. Users will be able to participate in HVV via any wireless handset, as well as by PC and digital TV. For instance, residents could consult their personal calendar wherever they happen to be - in front of a computer at the office, watching TV at home, or using a cell phone on the go. The envisioned menu of offerings will let them create their own social organizations, office networks, or mobile commerce opportunities, and a profiling system will let them control and update their personal data minute by minute.
Say it's Tuesday. You've had a hard day at work and don't feel like joining your friends at the gym. Your Nokia communicator flashes a message that the latest Aki Kaurismäki movie is playing tonight at the local art house - the HVV system knows you might be interested because you went to see Leningrad Cowboys Meet Moses by the same director last week. So you message a friend who might want to go, too. She replies that she's already bought a ticket. With the aid of a seating plan that appears on your communicator screen, you not only book your admission but rebook hers, picking two seats in the middle of a row. The system alerts your friends that you won't be working out tonight and your home heating system that you'll be returning later than usual. Then it adds the fact that you're clearly nuts about Finnish auteurs to its ever-evolving list of your tastes and habits - maybe even notifying you that a movie club has formed in your apartment building. Would you like to join? Meanwhile, you haven't returned the message your mom left you at work; she wants to discuss her plans for Dad's surprise birthday party. Because she lives in Arabianranta and you've allowed her access to some parts of your HVV profile, she can see that you've gone to the movies tonight, sparing you a "Where are you?" scold on your voicemail.
Most of the technologies needed to construct such a wireless world already exist, though many are not yet in widespread use. Nor has anyone succeeded in putting them all together in one place for a population that's clued in enough to want to use them. But Finland is a great place to test such a venture: Mobile connections there have outnumbered fixed phone lines for more than two years, and more than 70 percent of the population has a cell phone. (See "Just Say Nokia," Wired 7.09, page 134.) "Sonera's real strength is that it's in the most advanced marketplace in the world," says Janten Sythoff, an analyst for Frost & Sullivan, a San Jose, California-based marketing research company specializing in IT and telecommunications. "This is a way of keeping ahead of the game. If they lose that edge, they lose a lot."
Timo Laaksonen, who runs Decode, a software startup in Arabianranta, thinks that HVV could end up saving him a lot of time and money. "Say we want a Java programmer," he says. Finding the right candidate could be as simple as scrolling through the HVV community profiles, which would provide snapshots of residents' skills, work styles, and availability. "That's the difference between an online community and an ordinary Web site," Laaksonen says. "With a Web site, the content is static. With a community, the members are the content."
Mielonen talks about his project with a quiet confidence. It will, he says, become a landmark, a living example of how wireless societies can work. "It's the chance to create not only a virtual community, but a real community," he says. Pekka Korpinen, Helsinki's deputy mayor for city planning and real estate, believes it will foster a rebirth of urban cohesion and vitality. If cities have acquired an image as asocial places whose inhabitants are perpetually lonely in a crowd, Korpinen thinks that HVV can become the model for a new, more fluid type of urbanism in which people start to talk to each other again. "Mobility," Korpinen says, "gives you the freedom to be more collective."
Sociologist Keith Hampton, a professor in MIT's Department of Urban Studies and Planning who has studied community networking, says he would expect Arabianranta to adopt such a system quickly, in part because it is a new development, and new residents always have a lot in common. "They want to find the best schools, they want to find a reliable dry cleaner, they want the nearest pizza restaurant." And they'll want help with new-home woes, too, from getting the newspaper delivered to getting the garbage picked up. "They're going to want to seek other people's opinions," Hampton says.
But, of course, no one knows for sure how the people of Arabianranta will react to HVV, or what sort of community they will form around it. The challenge for its creators is to build the kind of future people will want to live in.
Nordic companies have an enviable track record when it comes to forming alliances like the one Sonera has undertaken with HVV. In 1991 Finland became the first country to achieve the GSM standard that is now in place all over Europe. This happened largely because local telcos realized there was little point in each European country having phones that wouldn't work if they crossed borders; they figured out early on that they needed to set up common standards at home and abroad. Although the WAP services available on current phones remain slow and prone to crashes, the next major upgrade - third-generation, or 3G, wireless - will introduce wireless broadband. Under ideal conditions, 3G phones will be able to transmit data at speeds of up to 2 Mbits per second, send video, and surf the Internet as quickly as the fastest fixed-line connections. This makes multicompany alliances practically essential. "If you're talking mobile Internet," says Frost & Sullivan's Sythoff, "you've got so many elements that have to work together."
Sonera, which expects to introduce 3G service in Helsinki and other European cities early in 2002, has been bidding vigorously for licenses worldwide. Last year they formed the Wireless Information Society Alliance (WISA) with IBM, Symbian, and Digia in order to build a complete 3G system, from network infrastructure and server software down to cell phone apps. Sonera's networks already provide mobile service to more than half of Finland's users, and the company has a reputation for offering some of the best-rated WAP services in the country. IBM is providing its WebSphere server software, which allows different devices to exchange information seamlessly. Symbian is sharing the code to its popular operating systems. And Digia, a local developer of software for Symbian, is creating the apps that subscribers will use on their handsets.
With Helsinki Virtual Village, the collaboration will have a real-world proving ground. "We can test how the different technologies work with real people in real situations," says Kurt Lönnqvist, manager of IBM Nordic's Mobile Internet Solutions division. "In this special, small environment, we have a living laboratory."
Sonera ignited the HVV project in early 1999, when the company was about to sign a contract to provide Arabianranta with a conventional wireless infrastructure. A couple of years before, the city of Helsinki - in partnership with local landowners, developers, the national Ministry of Trade and Industry, and the city's University of Art and Design - had formed Art and Design City Helsinki (ADC Helsinki), an effort to turn the area into a tech hub that would compete with neighboring IT-friendly suburbs like Espoo, where Nokia is headquartered. The waterfront site was chosen as much for its metaphorical value as its location; Helsinki was founded there 451 years ago, and the industrial revolution took hold there in the city's first factories, some of which still stand along Håmeentie street. The city earmarked $27 million to clean up the heavy metals that were byproducts of the past and to ready the land for construction. The whole area - businesses and homes, old and new - was linked with fiber-optic cable. The university was preparing to open a media lab called Lume on the site, boasting ultramodern multimedia production studios, stages, and theaters available for hire. And over the next 10 years, the city planned to spend around $440 million building new homes there.
Mielonen and his colleagues couldn't help but notice this extraordinary environment. First, the fiber-optic infrastructure provided a base for broadband connectivity. Second, Arabianranta was small and self-contained. And third, its inhabitants were shaping up to be an exciting mix of technofreaks, artists, entrepreneurs, students, and middle-class home buyers. ADC Helsinki had been toying with the idea of community networking, but no one had yet dreamed of a wireless one. Suddenly, the notion seemed obvious.
In short order, Sonera and its partners struck a deal with ADC Helsinki to create HVV. It was an extremely cost-effective project. For the most part, the business partners were supplying tech they already had in development or had already produced. So the estimated budget for setting up HVV - to be shared by Sonera, ADC Helsinki, and the Finnish Ministry of Technology - was only $1.2 million. The project would be steered by a committee of representatives from ADC Helsinki and Sonera, with Mielonen as chair. They plan to take a firm hand - at least early on - to make sure things get done right. Until the new residents move in and start making their own decisions about what they want HVVto be, anyone outside the committee who wants a product or service included in the project will need approval.
"If there's too much democracy in this intermediate period, it will never go anywhere," Mielonen says with quiet firmness. "There will be too many possibilities, too many meetings, too many discussions. I want to make sure this gets on the rails."
It is Digia's job to put together HVV's platform - the common software that enables all the residents, workers, and students to communicate with one another. From their offices on the top floor of one of the renovated warehouses on Håmeentie street, Digia's employees look out over the bleak scrubland that will eventually be framed by housing. The company, founded four years ago by Finnish financial journalist Pekka Sivonen to create applications for cell phones, was one of the startups drawn to Arabianranta's nascent tech hub. It has since grown to 140 employees and has earned a reputation as one of Finland's leading wireless software developers. Sonera bought a 15 percent stake in the company for $1.1 million in 1999.
HVV presents an incredible opportunity for Digia, which is spending about a third of its $7 million research and development budget to be involved. Not only do the alliances with IBM and Symbian give it early access to software code - a significant competitive edge - but having HVV as a real-life test zone could revolutionize Digia's R&D process. "Every 12 months there's a major upgrade in wireless technology," says Sivonen as he paces around a glass-walled meeting room. "You miss two or three months and you're behind in the life cycle. If you don't develop something in time, someone else will," he says. "That's why we needed Helsinki Virtual Village."
Sivonen has just returned from the US, where, to raise a second round of financing for Digia, he's been preaching wireless to VCs. He's returned with $30 million from investors like Bayview 2000, Cisco Systems, GE Equity, Intel, and Sony. Now he pours some coffee into an elegant triangular cup - made, fittingly enough, by the Arabia pottery company, whose headquarters are still on Håmeentie street - and pulls the latest Ericsson R380 smartphone from his briefcase.
At first glance it looks just like a standard mobile phone, but then Sivonen showily flips up the keyboard to reveal its touch-sensitive PDA screen - almost as big as the phone itself - which can be used as a keyboard, or to access the Web or email. Sivonen was one of the first to get one. "This isn't available in the shops yet," he beams.
In Finland, seemingly every businessperson carries a smartphone or communicator; both are mobiles crossed with organizers that can browse the Web or send and receive email and faxes. Smartphones have a standard phone keypad; communicators come with a flip-top typewriter keyboard. These devices hint at the sort of future HVV is embracing.
Digia operates its own wireless LAN: Short-range radio base stations in the office constantly transmit data to and from any communicators within several hundred feet. Every time Sivonen walks through the door, the network updates his diary and contact list. The company's CEO, Jari Puhakka, uses his Nokia 9110 Communicator to signal his car to warm the temperature inside to 75 degrees Fahrenheit. Meanwhile, Sivonen and his five golf partners can synchronize their tee times by using Microsoft Schedule Plus. Imagine 12,000 residents able to share information in these ways.
By late last year, a team of 25 Digia engineers was refining what it calls the iD Platform, a collection of nine software applications. iD Club allows people to create and run bulletin boards, manage membership lists, and store files for businesses or social organizations; iD Calendar is a diary function that lets users synchronize schedules; iD Document provides a system for archiving, searching, and organizing documents. With iD Commerce, entrepreneurs can start their own ecommerce ventures, build product catalogs, and set up systems for processing payments. iD Content has a simple template for adding new sites to HVV; iD Connect will direct messages to any device the subscriber is using. And so it goes.
Or so they hope it goes. The biggest potential problem in getting all this to work is that people will be accessing HVV through PCs, digital TVs, PDAs, smartphones, and communicators with any number of different operating systems - from Windows CE to Palm OS and EPOC - and using a multiplicity of the applications added on to their devices. How can the information from this battery of appliances be made readable? That problem is solved through the use of an IBM-provided transcoding publisher: Any information supplied to HVV will be written onto a template that automatically translates it into the different versions required for each operating system.
And what if each resident has two or three devices - say a simple PalmPilot for personal use and a communicator for work? How can users keep all the devices updated with the latest version of their personal information?
"This is one of the most intriguing and most difficult parts of what we're doing," admits Digia R&D director Janne Lipiainen. Again using IBM software, the company is putting together a system that stores users' most current information and updates the devices that lag behind. So if you've been playing chess with another HVV resident on your smartphone, you can continue playing on your PC later, where the latest version of the game will be ready for you.
Digia is hoping to be ready to go live by the time residents of the first new housing arrive this summer. Say you move into one of the new homes in Arabianranta and log on to HVV for the first time, using a communicator, a conventional PC, or a digital TV. The first step would be to create what looks much like any conventional homepage. Through it you can access existing services that Digia has tailored for the locals - a newsfeed, weather reports, public transportation maps, and links to Helsinki's ultra-IT-friendly library service, the first in the world to put its entire inventory online as a searchable database.
But for an interactive community to come to life, it has to know who you are so it can recognize you whenever, wherever, and however you're using it. When you first log on to HVV, you're invited to create a profile by contributing information about yourself. This could include basics like your age, gender, and address. From there, you could add your interests, birth date, perhaps your birthplace or the schools you attended.
The system will link your profile to those of others with similar hobbies or backgrounds. If you were born in the western town of Vaasa, HVV can supply you with the email addresses of other HVV residents who were also born there. If you enter hevibändi (heavy-metal bands) on your list of interests, you might - hypothetically, at least - be invited to join an online metal club. Hypothetically, because HVV won't come with its own precreated clubs. Mielonen and his colleagues expect that users will set up their own, using the iD Club software, which Digia hopes any relatively unsophisticated computer user will be able to master quickly. "People have to use this voluntarily," says IBM's Kurt Lönnqvist. "That's where it starts and ends."
If previous attempts at community networking are any indication - for example, the experience of Netville, a short-lived wired community that formed in a town in Ontario in 1996 - HVV will have no problem spawning its own set of clubs and organizations. A study of Netville by MIT's Keith Hampton and University of Toronto sociology professor Barry Wellman found that Netville's virtual community coalesced with surprising speed after developers offered residents a free trial broadband cable service.
"In Netville there was no attempt to create a community for residents," says Hampton. "It was something they had to go out and do themselves. Netville was all self-organizing."
Signs are that HVV will also self-organize pretty quickly. In Arabianranta, Yrjo Simojoki, the pastor of the local Lutheran church on Håmeentie street, was one of the first people in the neighborhood to contact Mielonen to find out how he could join HVV. The 60-year-old pastor admits almost total ignorance about the workings of the Net, but he's determined to give HVV a try. "I think the church must be a content provider," he says, slipping happily into the jargon.
Simojoki may not grasp the intricacies of the wireless intranet, but he has a pretty shrewd idea of its potential. He knows he'll be able to notify church members of events; he's even looking forward to using it to distribute the new catechism his church has just produced. But it's the system's interactivity that impresses him most. "It is important also for pastoral counseling. How do you say ..." - he struggles for the right word - "chat ?"
Mielonen and his fellow committee members hope that once HVV is running smoothly, they'll be able to step back from their supervisory role and let users have the ultimate say about what happens within the system. Which means that people are going to have to create their own decision-making structures within HVV - their own ways of suggesting new ideas, of discussing them and forming a consensus. One of the companies currently petitioning the committee is Decretum, an Arabianranta-based startup that wants to include its Ideafactory software in the HVV package. Ideafactory is designed to enable what Decretum calls a "digidemocracy" via online debating forums and secure polling systems. The software is already being used by a member of the European Parliament to gauge the opinions of constituents.
Deputy mayor Pekka Korpinen is excited about the democratic possibilities of HVV. He thinks discussion of city plans on a broadband network could make life easier for local government. For example, he says, right now citizens interested in seeing architectural drawings for new urban ventures can find them at the local library, but only in 2-D - which makes it easy for people to misunderstand the plans and object to them. But with a broadband community intranet, "you can create 3-D images, and then people can start to participate positively. It's a huge step forward."
Keith Hampton has a word of caution, however, for city leaders - and perhaps also for Mielonen and his committee. "You may think you're giving people a tool to make them more involved in their own community life, but they can use the technology to turn this against you real fast," Hampton says with a laugh. "That's what happened in Netville."
When the housing developer announced it planned to discontinue the broadband trial, residents were furious. Via email lists, they quickly organized a protest and contacted local reporters with stories of betrayal. Netville was shut down at the end of 1998, despite residents' protests. But in its brief existence it had demonstrated the potential such communities hold to benefit urban life.
In "Grieving for a Lost Network," a paper about Netville that he wrote last year, Hampton said: "In the not-so-distant future, with the growth of wireless Internet technology, the movement of people into wired housing developments, and the wiring of existing neighborhoods for high-speed Internet access, computer-mediated communication may serve as a cure for the decline in social capital and loss of civic society that many feel we are experiencing."
One of the biggest sources of potential conflict between HVV users and administrators is the user profile. After you've provided the basic information about yourself, personalization software kicks in, tracking every aspect of your activity online and, if you allow it to, adding that data to your profile. Personalization engines aren't new: Amazon.com has long used them to produce those "recommended" lists, based on your previous purchases, that appear whenever you log on.
With 3G-enabled phones, which maintain a constant connection, HVV users could be online pretty much every waking hour - in the car, in the office, even on the underground Metro system. Each transaction you make could be registered to your profile. In Helsinki you can already use your mobile phone to get soft drinks from vending machines, buy gas, select records on jukeboxes, or pay for time on parking meters. You punch a number on your handset, scroll down a menu, press OK, and you've made a purchase. Bluetooth chips in the latest phones allow them to "talk" directly to short-range radio transceivers placed in vending machines or at checkouts. Instead of racking up charges on your credit card, you're now adding them to your monthly phone bill. "Your phone," says Mielonen, "becomes your virtual wallet."
Now throw in the fact that the HVV system knows where you are, too; service providers can measure cell phone signals to determine the location of a caller within a block or two. Cellular positioning could become a useful tool for ecommerce in Arabianranta. Say the local burger bar hits a slow hour. It could send out a discount offer to users in the immediate area. Some mobile devices now come equipped with GPS technology that can pinpoint your whereabouts even more precisely. That's particularly handy if you're trying to find the nearest gas station; your phone can tell you exactly how to get there.
But since you, the consumer, can be tracked minute by minute, cent by cent, inch by inch, you'll have to place a great deal of trust in a system that's armed with so much information. "Even without GPS, there is very good technology that can locate you within 50 yards or so," says Caspar Bowden of the London-based Foundation for Information Policy Research, which studies how governments are reacting to the challenge of IT. "Because there is no Off button with 3G phones, it's like putting an electronic tag on half the population."
"If we misuse user profiling, that could really kill it," says IBM Nordic's Lönnqvist. "If you don't provide added value to me as a consumer, I will say no to user profiling. You will not be allowed to track me. I think that is one of the key checks and balances for the future."
But Bowden interprets Lönnqvist's equation a little differently: "People will sell their privacy for a free lunch," he says. "With 3G, nobody knows how much that free lunch is going to cost - what the demand is from advertisers and other companies." His research - funded by Microsoft and several UK-based Internet service providers - has left him convinced that legislators are going to have to watch the development of 3G ecommerce networks closely. "The crucial test will be what constitutes an informed consent document," says Bowden. "You're not going to get company lawyers coming up with an option that says: 'Select this box unless you want us to collect all sorts of information about what's going on inside your head.'"
The creators of HVV say they are determined to make sure the system protects the privacy of its users. "We have to make it secure," says Timo Salminen, ADC Helsinki's project manager. The committee overseeing HVV decided to put ADC Helsinki in charge of the system's user profiles, so that no single company will "own" them or be able to exploit them. Nonetheless, admits Salminen, privacy concerns have been the project's biggest challenge so far. "The core technical issue now," he says, "is how to make all the services work with one secure core database." Originally, HVV was supposed to go online in January, but late last year the HVV committee postponed setting a debut date until spring. "We want to make 100 percent sure of our security before we go ahead," Salminen says.
In the Finnish Ministry of Justice, Pekka Nurmi is already wrestling with the problems 3G will present. He's director general of a unit dedicated solely to drafting data protection legislation. Thus far, the Finnish government has adopted stringent European Commission directives on data privacy. It's illegal to pass on any information about users' movements, and service providers must obtain permission to store personal data or pass it on to third parties. Now Nurmi has to apply the directives to the rapidly changing wireless environment. "We're eager to come to grips with this," he says, adding that his department has set up a large working group to look into the issue of cellular positioning. "We have to find a good balance between legislating and allowing enterprise to function," says Nurmi. "We're a very technically advanced culture - but we're very pragmatic about the legal provisions we're going to need."
"The fundamental question is probably not a technological or legal one," says Kishore Swaminathan, director of research at the Center for Strategic Technology Research, a division of Accenture (formerly Andersen Consulting) that studies how communications technologies will affect the way we live. He recently oversaw a worldwide survey of online communities, the results of which were noted in a report called "Can Technologies Transform? Experimenting with Wired Communities."
"There is a tension between privacy and offering customized services," he says. "It's a question of whether society is willing to give up this privacy for convenience. Or is society going to say, 'No, I don't want any consortium to know how I'm spending my money'?"
No one has ever tried creating something like HVV before, so it's difficult to say what the odds are for the project. It could become stalled over an issue like user profiling, but success could also kill it. Swaminathan's group found that most virtual communities are drawn together only as long as their technology is ahead of the pack. Once the larger world acquires equally effective tech, the ties that bind a community usually loosen. "It's increasingly hard to capture the imagination of a significant number of people in a local area," says Swaminathan, "because there are increasing numbers of free, noncommunity-based services available - with no strings attached."
Networking idealists have always preferred to believe that online communities have a transcendent sociological value. Attempts to use computers to reinforce the social fabric date back to 1984, when three young activists in Berkeley, California, set up the Community Memory Project. They placed terminals in the local library, in a senior center, even in a laundromat. For a dollar you could start a topic, for a quarter you could add a comment. Reading was free. One of the early users was musician Country Joe McDonald, who helped set up an online Berkeley Vietnam Veterans Memorial listing all of the city's Vietnam War fatalities.
Throughout the '80s, Usenet newsgroups, bulletin boards, and multiuser gaming sites encouraged people to form relationships with people they'd never met. Real-space communities were soon initiating wired communication themselves. By 1993, towns like Blacksburg, Virginia, had begun wiring up local housing to create their own intranet systems. Swaminathan's group found that an overall feeling of community has diminished as similar services have become available through other means, but Blacksburg Electronic Village did produce real and lasting changes - 87 percent of the town's residents now regard the Internet as part of their everyday lives and continue to use Electronic Village services. Meanwhile, the number of networked communities continues to grow. The University of Michigan's Community Networking Initiative, which was set up to study and support such efforts, has counted 184 sites in the US; many smaller-scale projects don't show up on the radar screen.
Now HVV is throwing mobility into the mix, making communication casual and unobtrusive. IBM Nordic's Kurt Lönnqvist, who has watched his children grow up in a mobile-tech world, believes Finnish society has changed forever. Young people can be spontaneous about making social plans, he says. On the streets, they're continually sending a stream of SMS messages back and forth to their friends: "Where R U?" "Let's meet." "C U at the bar." Lönnqvist believes his children have become freer about the way they lead their lives than his generation is. "They live with mobility every day. It's a way of life."
At the Helsinki University of Technology, sociologist Timo Kopomaa has tried to track these changes in Finnish society. "Spontaneity is something that is going to stay," he says. "It's a new generation that has grown up with these devices, and their lives are bound up with them." He studied groups of young phone users and noted several differences in lifestyle. Today's society may be more casual, but that doesn't mean social ties are disappearing. In fact, he found that phones are drawing people together in new ways. Young "telesurfers" often have larger social circles than non-phone-users. Close friends or relatives are in almost constant contact with each other, tending to share experiences as they happen. For friends, this has brought a new sense of tele-intimacy; for parents, reassurance.
Kopomaa believes the new wireless intimacy affects the workplace as well. "The mobile phone softens the structure of the working day," he says. "Workers don't have to plan so rigidly anymore - each day can unfold as meetings are set up when needed."
Jussi Kautto, head of Helsinki's development unit, which is commissioning architects to build the housing at Arabianranta, believes that building styles will evolve along with a mobile society. At the moment, the units there are conventional homes. "But their structure must change," he says. Kautto believes that over the next 10 years Arabianranta's architects will move toward "open building" techniques - offering homes that can be restructured as families grow and change, swapping bedrooms for home offices, bathrooms for kitchens, and so on - that allow rooms to be moved like furniture. "Homes," says Kautto, "must become more multifunctional."
But that will come later. For now, a growing number of companies are lining up to offer their products and services to Jari Mielonen's committee. "You've got lots of different parties, and each of those has seven ideas," Mielonen says. "'I want to do it this way,' 'I want to do it that way.' And our job is to marry them together." Planning a wedding is never simple, of course, and this one involves 12,000 people and enough potential interconnectedness to boggle the mind. "Every other day, it's like hell," he says happily.
