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Roger Malina brings the first conclusion to Lift France 11 and comes back on some of the most inspiring speeches of the conference.

Information technologies today interrupt and distract us, dividing our attention across a range of activities and devices. This feels like an inevitable state of affairs, but Alex Soojung-Kim Pang argues in his talk that it is not. Drawing on recent work in embodied cognition, contemplative practices, and interface design, he describes how we can create and use information technologies in a more thoughtful, meditative way, to help us work in a more sustained, creative and focused manner. He also explains what contemplative computing might mean for individuals as well as corporations, institutions and civic actors.

What happens when barriers to use of technology are lowered? What can we learn from the Ushahidi open source community and the technology landscape in Africa about the opportunity and the limits of open innovation? In her speech, Juliana Rotich answers these questions, based on her experience as director of a African non-profit tech company which specializes in developing free and open source software for information collection, interactive mapping and data curation.

In her speech, Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino gives an update on the methodology and results employed in the Homesense experiment: a project that rethinks how we design smart homes and investigate how we interact with technologies at home. This project applies open collaboration methods of online communities to physical infrastructures in the home.

The present-day approach towards a sustainable society is doomed to fail. The focus on sophisticated technology - electric and hybrid cars, energy-efficient devices, solar panels and wind turbines, for instance - has little or no effect because these green technologies require large amounts of energy and resources for their manufacture, which makes their development highly dependent on a continuous supply of fossil fuels. What we need to solve our problems is exactly the opposite: less sophisticated technology. There is a lot to learn from the past. While they often worked surprisingly good, most of low-tech solutions have been completely forgotten. In his speech, Kris de Decker explains that reverting to past technologies does not mean that we should go back to the Middle Ages. Rather, it means combining old tech with new knowledge and new materials, or applying old concepts and lost knowledge to modern technology.

Alain Renk describes "Unlimited Cities", a participatory platform used by architect to enable citizens to change their neighborhood. A rapid prototyping tool, this service aims at allowing people to bring their ideas and react to architectural or urbanistic proposals in a situated way.

In this speech, Tobie Kerridge describes the "Material Beliefs" project, a design research project with a focus on a speculative approach to biotechnology as a form of engagement with the public.

The current disruption in healthcare corresponds to the fact that patients can access tools to gather information, aggregate data, act, and see results reflected in real-time. In his speech, Paul Wicks presents the consequences which can be listed as follows:
- Medicine: Patients are more engaged with managing their own illness, receive better outcomes / resistance from medical community in some quarters
- Research: Patients can find out about clinical trials going on anywhere in the world and participate online or even carry out their own research programs - increasingly being viewed as credible in the peer-reviewed world
- Business: Payers want to pay for improved outcomes, not transactions. The pill must be shown to be more effective than existing alternatives in the real world, not just a placebo in a controlled trial.
- Safety: Patients can submit their own safety events in real-time and enter in to a dialogue with manufacturers about how to improve their products.

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

A leading researcher on globalization, global cities and new technologies Saskia Sassen discusses the current hype around smart cities. She reminds us that “It is the need to design a system that puts all that technology truly at the service of the inhabitants—and not the other way around.”

Want to get more information? Check these related articles:

A propos de S. Sassen et de « l’urbanisme open-source » sur Technogéographie (in French)

An interview with Saskia Sassen about "Smart cities" by Nicolas Nova