'Everyone uses mobile phones these days', and that statement provides the perfect segue into our final guest, Dr Katherine Moline from the Faculty of Art and Design at the University of New South Wales.

Over the past year Katherine has run several workshops entitled Myths of the Near Future which has been all about exploring the relationship we have with those small rectangles of plastic and rare-earth metals that we obsessively carry around with us wherever we go.

Katherine Moline: It started from a series of works I'd done with phones and then mobile phones, just observing that people were…their behaviours were changing. And I do a lot of teaching with media and communication design and have taught a lot of stuff around this in different exercises. So the workshop brought together those exercises, if you like, in a different series, which I've run with senior researchers down at RMIT and first-year design students at Griffith.

Antony Funnell: And these workshops are designed to get people rethinking the assumptions that they have about their relationship with smart phone technology.

Katherine Moline: Exactly. I mean, it comes from a very different angle than human computer interface researchers or people involved with classic ethnography. It's really looking at trying to shock or de-familiarise people's assumptions about their phones and how they use them.

Antony Funnell: So how do you go about doing that?

Katherine Moline: Well, I set a couple of pre-workshop activities, one is to read a JG Ballard short story called 'The Intensive Care Unit' from the 1970s, and another is to shadow or stalk a friend where they are using their mobile phone and to observe just the different interactions that happen. And the JG Ballard story is quite shocking, it really does predict webcams and talks about a family who meet the very first time after their entire family life being conducted via webcam. And it was written in the '70s. And how they unfortunately all murdered each other when they first met, they were so shocked at what they were really like when they weren't curated by TV.

Antony Funnell: So the idea is this curation aspect, isn't it, that many of us don't realise that while smart phones are terrific things, they are actually curating our lives in a way that other forms of technology haven't in the past.

Katherine Moline: Exactly. And wisely or acutely self-conscious when they are using their phones, so they have become branding mechanisms, not often heartfelt, raw gossip that you might have heard on the telephone previously. But particularly when people use images they are curating their own lives. So that really changes things.

Antony Funnell: So we think about communication devices as just that, as communication devices. We often don't realise, do we, that they are also part of storytelling, the storytelling of our own lives. How did you address that story-making aspect of mobile technology with the participants in these workshops?

Katherine Moline: Well, once we've discussed the kinds of ideas that the short story and stalking a friend brought up for people, participants in the workshop, we then go into sharing gossip really about phones, things that have happened, mishaps, errors, overheard conversations they probably shouldn't have. Participants have lots of good stories about problems with phones, and also delightful media moments, I call them, where they have two things coinciding, listening to something on the radio or overhearing a piece of music from a distant location while they are driving their car or doing two things at once, because I think the mobile phone and multitasking brings up lots of serendipitous moments.

So we talk about that for a while. And then I ask them to…and by this point they are usually very comfortable and have had a few laughs, so we swap phones or I invite participants to swap phones. Some people opt out at that point because they don't feel that…or they are aware that there is something on their phone they don't want someone else to see. But most people go along with it, and we just have a discussion about any areas that are no-go zones that they don't want other people to look at. And then I ask them to do what I call a spoken portrait of the semi-stranger whose phone they have in their hands. So it's got a great slightly voyeuristic aspect to it, but it kind of creates…I give them 20 minutes to create a spoken portrait or a description of the person from what's in their phone.

Antony Funnell: And the voyeuristic aspect, the stalking, as you said, of other people's uses of mobile phones, that's about seeing the phone not through your own eyes but through the eyes of somebody else. Is that correct?

Katherine Moline: That's right, and I think this brings up ideas…and of course there's a lot of commentary going on around surveillance, and how people are storing so much stuff on their phone that they are not even aware of. You just forget what kinds of photographs you've got, the sorts of texts that are still in your instant messaging or emails you've sent, your search histories in Google, all that stuff kind of is open for somebody else to go through and get to know you through your phone.

Antony Funnell: You've told us about the specifics of the workshop and what you want it to do. Just tell us about some of their reactions that you got from participants.

Katherine Moline: One participant…this was at RMIT…commented on her realisation of how little she remembered about what she stored on her phone. And she said, in her words, 'As the mobile phone is a thing that assembles a lot of activities in my life that both serves as a tool for organising and for disorganising, I became a bit uncertain of my use of it, and, to be quite frank, I had no idea of how little I knew of what kind of traces I have left on my phone.'

Another really strong comment was about the effective dimension of smart phones. And this participant commented that it renewed their attachment to the phone, saying that he 'left the workshop feeling a bit more affectionate towards my phone because it's not only the big data, what's collected about me through my use, but that as an object it can be revealing to another person'. And I think that pretty much sums up the whole idea of how the workshop really looks closely or embraces uncertainty and a lot of ambiguity, because we don't think about these things necessarily consciously, we just take them for granted, they are tacit understandings. And when the workshop pulls out what's really going on with people in their phones, it gives them some new ideas to take back to maybe thinking more about their phone use.

Antony Funnell: Katherine Moline, thank you very much for joining us on Future Tense.

Katherine Moline: My pleasure, thank you.

Antony Funnell: And Katherine's workshops have been...

[Mobile phone rings]

Hang-on, let me just turn this thing off. Annoying little things, aren't they. There. As I was saying, Katherine's workshops have been held with RMIT University in Melbourne and in conjunction with the Experimental Thinking / Design Practices exhibition that's just finishing up at the Queensland College of Art at Griffith University in Brisbane, and for which Katherine was a curator.

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