city

Wow! Our neighbors at Usine across the river constructed a spectacular temporary urban construction, which will be inaugurated tonight. The installation looks like a parasite winding around the building and features 3d projections screens. It also offers visitors the opportunity to access the building's roof to enjoy a great view on Geneva!

It's part of UZ.N, the Usine's 22th birthday festival, which will feature 6 weeks of transdisciplinary performances, including a conference on on cultural urbanism September 28-29.

The urban sculpture was designed by Architecture 1024 ,
Artfactories/ Autre(s)pARTs, our partners HEAD and Lumens8 as well as illico Prod. Nice, thumbs up!

Teaser U.ZN from Projet UZN on Vimeo.

This talk explores some of the issues that emerge around networked information-collecting objects in our public spaces, and to frame a taxonomy of such objects from the unobjectionable (due to local effect and a clear public good associated with them) to those that ought to be causing us significant concern (no public benefit, global impact, pernicious second-order effects).

Adam is a long-time friend of Lift, he shared his work with us on several occasions in Geneva, Marseille and Korea. Watch his previous Lift talks:
"Everyware: Further down the Rabbit Hole" Lift07
"The read/write City" Lift Asia 07
"The Long Here, the Big Now" Lift Asia 08

Yesterday, I went to a small village in Savoy, France. This was a good opportunity to take a picture of these two forms of signage that are pervasive in this country. On the one hand, you have the common “Ville fleurie” (’flowered cities’) which corresponds to a sort of rating French cities get to evaluate the presence of flowers. The more flower you get on the signage, the better it is. This classification is pervasive and it’s very rare not to find it. On the other hand, you have the sort of equivalent for the 21st Century: the “Ville Internet” (’Internet City’) rating. Instead of flowers, it uses “@” symbols to evaluate the quality of Information Technology infrastructure of the city.

What’s funny is that it’s very difficult to encounter this label. Especially because they’re only placed at city entrance, which means that you only see them while driving.

We proudly received the confirmation of the City of Geneva Administrative Council support for Lift10.

Nouvelles technologies: la Ville de Genève apporte son soutien à la Conférence LIFT

Le Conseil administratif a décidé d'apporter son soutien à la cinquième Conférence LIFT, qui se tiendra à Genève du 5 au 7 mai 2010. La Ville de Genève, cité innovante et tournée vers les nouvelles technologies, financera notamment vingt «bourses» qui seront accordées à dix étudiant-e-s en Suisse et dix étudiant-e-s à l'étranger, qui pourront ainsi prendre part à cette conférence.

Du 5 au 7 mai prochain, l'association LIFT organisera au Centre international de conférences Genève (CICG) sa cinquième conférence internationale, qui devrait accueillir un millier de participant-e-s provenant d'une quarantaine de pays. Les thèmes abordés seront les défis actuels et les solutions créatives en rapport avec les nouvelles technologies de l'information et de la communication.

Créée en 2006, LIFT existe désormais en Europe et en Asie. L'association a pour but de permettre aux acteurs et actrices d'un monde qui n'a jamais changé aussi vite de se saisir du potentiel transformateur des nouvelles technologies. Chaque conférence offre la possibilité de comprendre les effets de l'innovation sur la société, et de transformer le changement en opportunité.

Thanks to Pierre Maudet and his colleagues for recognizing and supporting our work to make our city and region more dynamic, creative and attractive!

Carlo Ratti, director of the Senseable City Lab at MIT, shows various projects he and his lab conducted around the theme of sensed data (mobile phone, flickr pictures) and how they allow to reveal new information layer on top of urban space and or lead to new experience for citizens.

Dan Hill, from urban engineering firm Arup, revisits the past vision of the city of the future and shows they turned out differently. He discusses the important interplay between urban soft infrastructure (people, networks, culture, society, civic relationships) and hard infrastructure. Which leads him to the role of design thinking in developing this new layer information/services based on personal informatics.

Dan Hill, from urban engineering firm Arup, revisits the past vision of the city of the future and shows they turned out differently. He discusses the important interplay between urban soft infrastructure (people, networks, culture, society, civic relationships) and hard infrastructure. Which leads him to the role of design thinking in developing this new layer information/services based on personal informatics.

We had this workshop yesterday; about designing future hybrid cities, we all split into groups on different topics such as, “endless energy city”, “ ambient city”, etc.

I ended up in the nomadic city group, and so right now I guess you must be asking yourself but what is a nomadic city ??...well, actually defining this was kind of the point of this workshop...And so we had this long brainstorming with so many interesting but very abstract question, it started by understanding whether we were talking about people nomadism through the cities or the city being nomad itself.

But even once you’ve chosen one of those path, it’s absolutely not an answer, it’s more like a hundred more question and so the brainstorming went on and on and on and on and I‘ve got to tell that I haven’t been focused from the beginning to the end.

What I know is that people had different conception of what makes a city, for some people it was about infrastructure moving through space and / or time, without border, this can basically be shop or other stuff with very short temporality ( imagine that every single shops , restaurants, institutions changed every month, continuously, how could you feel the belonging to a city, wouldn’t that be some kind of nomadism? The extreme example of that are some huge festival like The Burning Man, where a city emerge in a few days and disappears few days later.

Jury Hahn is the co-founder of MegaPhone, a gaming company based in New York which makes real-time multi-player games on cell phones. Jury explains the potential of mobile gaming, and how phones can allow rich public interactions. She then demos MegaPhone's gaming platform and Lift participants go wild and play against one other :)

I have no idea why Google put me in the video thumbnail, if someone knows how to change that I'm happy to hear your solution :)

Jury Hahn is the co-founder of MegaPhone, a gaming company based in New York which makes real-time multi-player games on cell phones. Jury explains the potential of mobile gaming, and how phones can allow rich public interactions. She then demos MegaPhone's gaming platform and Lift participants go wild and play against one other :)