ethnography

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"?

What would a diverse, complex world brain look like? Considering how digital culture and enable a multiplicity of knowledges. Ramesh Srinivasan, an Assistant Professor at the University of California Los Angeles, speaks about the importance of cultural differences in knowledge production and technology design. Through various stories, he shows the differences in cultural appropriation and the inherent creativity of people in adpating technologies to the uses that benefit them best.

What would a diverse, complex world brain look like? Considering how digital culture enables a multiplicity of knowledges.
Ramesh Srinivasan, an Assistant Professor at the University of California Los Angeles, speaks about the importance of cultural differences in knowledge production and technology design. Through various stories, he shows the differences in cultural appropriation and the inherent creativity of people in adpating technologies to the uses that benefit them best.

With an interdisciplinary background as engineer, designer, social scientist, and ethnographer, Ramesh researched topics as diverse as the relation between indigenous and local knowledge systems and new media or the use of design and social-science perspectives to analyze the impacts of information technology on global education, health, economics, politics, governance, and social movements, and infrastructure.

Ramesh earned a doctorate in design from Harvard University, a Master of Science in Media Arts and Sciences from MIT Media Laboratory and a Bachelor of Science in Industrial Engineering from Stanford University. He currently is Assistant Professor in the Department of Information Studies and Design|Media Arts at the University of California Los Angeles. Amongst others he has given talks at the World Bank, UNESCO, Government of India and Microsoft Research. Please find more info on his LIFT profile.

Why LIFT
Ramesh is interested in the divergent notions of futurism and utopia with respect to every layer of media and technology. His thoughts on diverse cultural domains around media and technology presents some very different notions of pastness, and future aspirations, ones that are very much locally grounded in environment, family, cosmology, and landscape.

What Ramesh expects
The 2009 edition will be Ramesh's first LIFT conference and he'll be curiously heading to Geneva in February for an animated exchange on where the future went.

Jan Chipchase is a researcher for Nokia Design. He details the nine trends he thinks will shape the future of social interactions, trends he identified through the extensive field work he and his team are conducting around the world. Jan's work shows how the digital devices are creating new practices and usages by becoming smaller and smaller, opening up a new design space for the mobile industry.