futures

The last session of the conference in Marseilles will address the final point of our them: as Alain Kay and others have claimed, "the best way to predict the future, is to invent it". In the 20th century, innovation became a expertise largely controlled by industrial companies. The open source movement, the social web as well as DIY practices has shown us that innovation is now a more open and decentralized process.

However, this bottom-up model if innovation is conditional. It's only only true if as many of us as possible are given the opportunity to discuss, build, experiment and reflect upon their present and their future. Embracing an DIY future also requires a certain kind of industrial model with open and generative technologies.

Two speakers will describe the conditions required to make that DIY futures possible. The first one will be dutch researcher Rob van Kranenburg from Waag Society (Amsterdam) who recently addressed this issue in his booklet entitled "The Internet of Things. A critique of ambient technology and the all-seeing network of RFID". And the second one will be Jean-Michel Cornu, chief scientist at FING who covers this issue in his futures research work.