future

We are happy to launch the Lift12 ticketshop today! This 7th Swiss edition of Lift will happen on 22-24 February 2012 in Geneva. The event will consist in the usual two and a half days of talks, workshops, demos and social moments. More details will follow in the coming weeks on the content, as we are busy defining the event's focus and program.

Registration

Buy your Lift12 tickets at the early bird price. The ticket shop is now open, and tickets start at only 650chf for 60 days. Students and press/bloggers passes are also available, while one day tickets will be offered after the end of the early bird period.
Please note that to minimize food waste, we will again ask you to buy your meals separately so that we can know precisely how many we need to order.
» Lift12 tickets shop.

Help us design Lift12!

Join the September 13 workshop to design Lift12 with us. We will discuss the event's format, theme, sessions, and speakers. This workshop is a unique opportunity to have your say on how the event happens. Seating is limited to 40 participants to ensure we have a decent level of interaction, so hurry up and register for a nice discussion followed by drinks at our office!
» Learn more.

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

"After decades of hype, false starts, and few successes, smart machines are finally ready for prime time. [...] This map, and the associated series of written perspectives, are tools to help navigate the coming changes. As we scanned across ten application domains, seven big forecasts emerged. In the process, we also identified three key areas of impact where the robot renaissance will change our lives over the next decade.

In each domain we focus on three levels of impacts:
(1) Robots helping humans understand ourselves
(2) Robots augment human abilities
(3) Robots automate human tasks"

What is interesting here:

• The variation in terms of shape/forms and what is considered here as a "robots",
• The assumpttions made about humans needs and desires,
• The mix between engineering projects, quotes from sci-fi movies and pictures,
• The rhetorical tricks (present tense, "from XXX to XXX", "Rise", "Every machine", "self-manage".

A few days after the end of Lift09, here is a first video which is actually a condensed of the short interview we made.

Only one question: "Where did the future go?"

And the answer from Nicolas Nova, Fabio Sergio, Daniel Kaplan, Remy Bourganel, Charles Nepote, Juliana Rotich and 5 other people we're missing the name so please don't hesitate and add it in a comment.

Lift Interviews - Where did the future go? from Axel Morales on Vimeo.

Thanks to all those who played the game.

Other videos are coming .... soon.

As a designer I’ve found really interesting the discussion about the role of designers in creating a vision of the future. Yesterday Patrick Gyger affirmed that we don’t have anymore a vision of the future, because we think we are living it. Indeed it is difficult to imagine the future, to predict it.

Matt Webb highlights how designers play an important role in reflecting and experimenting around the evolution of a product, of a service, of a system. But what are the tools in hand of designers to do that? Anab Jain invites us to play with tomorrow creating speculative scenarios of possible near future. The visionary “Metromatics 21th century” scenario of Frank Beau or the “Carnivore domestic entertainment robots” shown by James Auger are examples of this kind of practice.
To imagine the future we also need to know what didn’t work in the past. Nicolas Nova suggests a design strategy based on failure. We need to spot and document failures in order to not repeat them one more time. Some designers look at the prototype as a tool of conception, that leads to a more empirical design method based errors observation and progressive adjustments. Fabio Sergio believes that technology can actually be a material to sketch with. In this context the present becomes a sort of beta-version of the future we want to live in. In the picture above you can see an early prototype of a project where I tried to use a real plant as a computer input device.

So, let’s start to sketch our idea and let it grow. What we need is just a mixture of rationality and passion, of pragmatism and fantasy.

During the first intervention of this year LIFT conference, Patrick J. Gyger remarked that in the middle of the last century we were told that sci-fi literature was “extravagant fiction today cold fact tomorrow”. But if we look back at that time we can easily notice that the image of the future was more a kind of style, a leitmotif, rather than a real prediction. Examples of this stylish future are the bizarre architecture, glamour cities, flying cars.

Actually now we are living in the future of our grandparents. But the future seems to have taken a different form. Of course we’re still missing invisibility and tele-trasportation, but some of the concepts are here even if most of them have been realized without reaching their goals. That’s what Nicolas Nova calls “failures of Holy Grails”, inventions and products that didn’t success because of different reason: the technology wasn’t ready, they didn’t answer to any real need. For instance, the myth of the flying car inspired a lot of concepts like the “Airphibina” (1946) or the “Aerocar” (1949). They all failed because people didn’t really need a flying car. They just “wanted to dream about them”. Therefore in 2009 we can still see amazing old FIAT 500 running in the street instead of the flying taxi of “The fifth elemet”.

However, in Gyger’s opinion, today we’re living both the dreams and the nightmare of our grandparents. In one hand we’ve seen the dream of the tech-utopia become reality, we feel that we are living in THE future and we don’t dare too much to have a new visions of it. In the other hand we feel as living in dystopia, where technology is not longer a savior of humanity but rather the greatest threat, a danger to our private life.

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.

Clive van Heerden is creative director of Philips ‘Design Probes’ program. The projects he leads there include amongst others the exploration of electronic textiles for emotional sensing and expression as well as electronic tattoos that transform with touch.

Philips Design Probes is a dedicated ‘far-future’ research initiative to track trends and developments that may ultimately evolve into mainstream issues that have a significant impact on business. Emerging developments in five main areas are tracked - politics, economics, environment, technology and culture. The outcomes of this ‘far-future’ research are used to identify systemic shifts, with the aim of understanding ‘lifestyle’ post 2020. The main objective of this program is to stimulate the discussion and register feedback, challenging conventional ways of thinking to come up with concepts to stimulate debate.

On Friday afternoon, during the “New Frontiers” session, Clive will show us how to employ past technological failures to develop disruptive futures. For more information and to connect to Clive have a look at his LIFT page.

James Auger is a partner in the critical design practice Auger-Loizeau whose projects explore the role of technology as a mediator and modifier of the human experience in both contemporary and future societies. Their work has been exhibited and published globally over the past 8 years. He teaches on the Design Interactions course at the Royal College of Art in London and is currently undertaking a design practice based PhD looking into the role of robots in the home environment.

On their explorations into design for the near future they explored technology’s effect on human culture, behaviour and experience. A tooth implant that transmits sounds over the jaw-bone, a phone that blocks all other peripheral sensory distraction or several prototypes to augment animals are just some of the examples.

During the “Design thinking for the future” session on Friday, James will talk to us about the role designers can play in shaping our technological future. Find more info on James on his LIFT page or discover his projects on his website.