science fiction

We are very happy to announce that Chul Shin has accepted our invitation to participate as a speaker at Lift Asia 09. The legendary film producer, who created with Taekon V on of the most beloved characters in anime, will share with the audience his experience in film production.

Chul Shin will speak in the Storytelling session on Thursday afternoon with TED video director Jashon Wishnow and Julian Bleeker from Nokia Design.

Learn more about Chul Shin on his speaker profile and see some Taekwon V taekwondo movies here and here and here on Youtube :)

The relationship between science-fiction and design is rich and pretty straight-forward, as explained by UK designer Matt Webb. Starting from examples of believable "scientific fiction", he describes how he implements this sort of thinking into a design process to create original prototypes.

Memoires of a magnificent future: Flying cars and the shape of things to come.

As the director of the Swiss museum of science-fiction, Patrick Gyger has access to a large variety of documentation concerning the past representation of the future. In his Lift09 talk, he revisits these visions and describes the reasons why they fail to materialize.

Patrick J. Gyger La Maison d’ailleurs

Directs a Science fiction museum and is not so impressed with where we are now.
Jules Vernes at the begining of the century led to the begining of science fiction (1930’s) and Astonishing, Wonder, Super man...

Science Fiction even shaped consumer goods. It became a style, a product up to the 60’s(kitchen, cars, alcohol....) Do better, faster through technology

There was a time where the future was glamourous. Some of the concepts exist today, but the issue is where are the vision of tomorrow today?
None? We already live in “utopia” (food, housing, education...)
Actuelly, we live in dystopia where technology is no longer a savior but really a threat.

-> There is a History of the future worth looking at with the hopes and the fears of the ones before us. Science fiction allows us to question the notion of progress.

The two first conference was about how the science fiction written in the 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s.., influence the society, today; and why a lot of products come from this imaginative production were commercial failure.

Except for the first examples, like Jules Verne, which use to imagine future stories context with contemporary technologies-or technologies studies(industrial materials and tools)- the SF provided a lot of ideas about future, very close to utopias. This future were optimistic, with very individual advanced consumption goods.

No collective utopia.

We saw that, even if these technologies would be totally possible, most of them would never be used in the reality, because there is not a real need. It is not really useful.
Moreover, People wouldn't be- and for many examples, like the videophone or the intelligent fridge, were not- adopt by anyone because of the rise price.

So, there were a lot of products from SF which were failures, and according to Nicolas Nova, it is very important to understand why, in order to be able to improve innovation.

Some SF provide other point of view; For example, a collective one: the anticipation.
This kind of SF show societies falling down, because of a political or social system in decadence: “1984”, a society where you even cannot think about a criticism, with “Telesceens” able to watch you all the time; “A brave new wold”, or “Gattaca” where children are created in vitro, and where their destiny are chosen before their birth, “Brazil”, which describe a system improbable, based on overinformation....

All these stories are Dystopias, and show how amazing could be a society with so many technologies. It is interesting to use all these criticisms in the same way than people used 30s/40s SF stories in order create flying car or fridge endowed with screen.

What could be a new way of traveling, for example, using our real context, and our technologies?

Patrick J. Gyger is a Swiss historian, curator and writer. In the 1990s he specialised in medieval studies. Since 1999, he has been the director of Maison d’Ailleurs (the “House of Elsewhere”), a Swiss museum.

With it’s over 60,000 books and thousands of pulp magazines it houses one of the world’s largest collections of literature on science fiction, utopia, and extraordinary journeys.

In 2008, Patrick opened the “Espace Jules Verne”, a wing of Maison d’Ailleurs dedicated to Jules Verne and extraordinary journeys. In the early 2000s, he was one of the co-managers of European Space Agency’s ITSF study – Innovative Technologies from Science Fiction for Space Applications – a research looking into Science Fiction to find ideas for space engineers. His most recent book is “Flying Cars or, Memories of a Dreamt Future”.

Patrick, together with Nicolas Nova, will kick off the conference on Thursday morning with his talk in the first “Change” session. We are very much looking forward to his talk on “Memoires of a magnificent future”. Find more info on Patrick on his LIFT profile.