technology

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"?

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.

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.

Open Prosthetics is a movement and a community that looks to find economically feasible ways of producing medical devices for underserved medical populations and to give patients a way to participate to (even large and sophisticated) projects that develop technologies in their name. By facilitating the exchange of knowledge, Open prosthetics has allowed projects to develop that make prosthesis more available, while others focus more on new possibilities that would never find a market before that (such as specialized, customized, or even fancy replacement limbs), or even new ways of producing high-end research (lego hands for prototyping...).

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

Next Wednesday evening (7 April), at the Lift offices in Geneva, Michèle Laird and David Brown will be hosting a Lift@home event entitled: "Teens & Technology".

Lift creates a fantastic opportunity to understand how kids embrace digital technologies, but use them their own way. Six teenagers (13-18 years) from local and international schools will describe their experiences and share ideas for the future.

The presentations will be followed by a Q&A session.

The results from this Lift@home will be presented by Dave and Michèle at the upcoming Lift10 conference during the session on generations... so come along and join us! Sign up here.

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.

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.