communication

True story: a few years ago, I met a 40 years old mother who told me that, every once in a while, she and her son would get together virtually on MSN Messenger, her in the living room, him in his bed. They would discuss the day, share a few jokes, and sometimes engage into conversations they "could not have had face to face", like talking about some more sensitive and intimate stuff. The layers of technology they put between them actually facilitated a certain kinds of exchanges.

Whatever we think of this dynamic (some will find it brilliant, others horrifying), it is a fact that technologies have profoundly reshaped the way we communicate at home. Families function in a completely new way, and email is now the equivalent of postcards. I used to send postcards to my grandma, thinking "I need to use this obsolete form of communication to make her happy". Now my kids do the same with email. They use it only to interact with "old people" like me.

At Lift12, Stefana will share with us the results of hours of observation on families, telling us how technologies have reshaped our intimate interactions. She will give us a pragmatic view, and explain the good but also when technologies made our lives more complicated. She will answer the question raised by the opening session: is it us "with technology", or us "versus technology"?

As the new poster goes to print we decided to find a new tag line to define what Lift is, and what it does for us. After an intense brainstorm - and a lot of help from our friend Michèle Laird who is a constant source of inspiration for anything related to letters and words - we came up with:

Lift, inspiring and connecting pioneers since 2006

To quote one of the exchanges we had while working on this: "the tone is simple, catchy, discreet, action-driven in a non-pushy way; It is inclusive, makes people feel good, and emphasizes continuing innovation over a specific domain of competence. It also leaves the Lift format open for evolution".

The "since 2006" is a little bit of a joke, putting in perspective how those technologies that seem to have been here forever (remember life without email?) are in fact still very new.

I hope you like it. If not you will have to wait next year to see it go away, it's being printed as we speak ;D

Francesco Cara, a design strategist at Nokia with a psychology background, looks at the evolution of mobile communication ecosystems.

I absolutely love the plethora of avenues for contributing and helping influence the conference; this site and the community blogs, the face photos, fontself, the Not So Empty Book...

Simply wonderful. Congratulations on authoring such a wonderful conference and letting us add our own embellishments. :)