New URL for pasta and vinegar!

As my main affiliation is now the Near Future Laboratory, Pasta and Vinegar moved to this new cosy URL. More news later on.

A week in Paris

This week, I’m in Paris for few things:

• A workshop at ENSCI-Les Ateliers with Raphael Grignani (Method). It’s a week-long training in field research for design. We basically engage students in a short-but-intense observation session followed by analysis and prototyping steps. This time, the brief is the following: Bike share programs like Velib are becoming more and more popular around the world which leads novice cyclists and tourists to take the road… more often than not carelessly. In this engagement, you will observe and document how various demographics use Velibs in Paris – you are free to set the parameters of your observations. From these observations and insights, you will design a product or service that improves the overall Velib experience (safety, navigation, attachments, availability, etc.). The solution should somehow be based on disruptive practices, found problems or curious behavior. You have 5 days.
• A panel at IxDA Paris with Raphael and Moka Pantages Wednesday evening at Le Lieu du Design
• A short speech at ENSCI this Thursday at 1pm in the cafeteria (brownbag seminar!) about “unmet needs as an innovation Holy Grail”

Back to school days, course are being prepared

It’s back to school days here, pencils are being sharpened, wireless notebooks being bought… and new courses are being prepared.

This year will have a decent share of teaching in various institutions. I am currently preparing some fresh material for the following courses

• HEAD-Geneva for masters students:
• “Introduction to interaction design”: a year-long 2-hours a week course about the main notion of interaction design (affordance, mental models, design process, direct interaction, usability, interaction styles), the history of the field and the main subdomains (web, mobile, locative media, 3D virtual worlds, networked objects, etc.). It’s going to be a mix of lectures, discussions and practical exercises.
• “Usage-Oriented Design”: a semester-based course about how to apply field investigation in design. The emphasis will be made on data collecting techniques and how to turn the results into sound design. This one will be a mix of short lectures and studio-based activities.
• ENSCI, for undergraduate students:
• “Introduction to design research: from usage to design” with Raphael Grignani (Method, SF): a week-long workshop about how to apply field investigation in design, in November.
• “Usage-Oriented Design: from usage to prototyping” with Yves Rinato (Intactile design) in March 2012, which will also be a week-long workshop about the articulation between field investigation and design prototpying.
• Ecole Gobelins Annecy, for masters students:
• Bottom-up innovation and foresight: a three-days workshop about diffusion of innovation theories and foresight methodologies. This course is based on both lectures and workshop-based activities.
• EPFL, Lausanne, for masters students (yes I’m back teaching at my Alma Mater):
• “A creative toolbox for innovation” with Daniel Sciboz. The year-long weekly 3 hours course will be an overview of design processes, approaches and tactics. From prototyping to sketching, design ethnography and storyboarding. This course is based on both lectures, studio-based activities and a personal project by the students.

And of course there will be more punctual interventions in other places about similar topics.

Upcoming speeches in Lyon, Torino and Basel

October is a busy month, here are the blurbs of 3 talks I am going to give in the near near future:

Citic (Lyon, France) – October 15

I’ll be on a panel about how the usage of digital technologies and the hybridization of the digital and the physical will influence our relationship to space.

SHARE Festival (Torino, Italy) – October 20

Title: Accidents and failures as creative material for the near future
Abstract: This will be a talk about product failure, glitches, errors and accidents. It will focus on how people experience them and how they can be a starting point for creating near future worlds. Think for instance about creating prototypes and exhibiting problems within it to make them more compelling. Or showing something as it will work with the failures — so anticipating them somehow rather than ignoring the possibility. What will not work right? What problems will be caused? What does it mean? We will rely on examples of failed robots, absurd aircrafts or the intentional destruction of mobile phones and vending machines to show how studying these examples can be relevant in the design process. Based on these examples, the talk will deal with two issues: how can we include the exploration of failures in the design process? How to turn failures and people’s reaction to failures into prototyping tools?

Junior Research Day, Swiss Design Network (Basel, Switzerland) – October 28

Title: From Neuromancer to the Internet: the role of science fiction culture in design
Abstract: This will be a talk about a feeling you must have had as designers. About comments such as “Ah, you’re designing that interface from Minority Report” or “Oh yes, it’s like that weird chair from 2001 a Space Odyssey”. If your work is about interaction design, this kind of remarks are very common, but it also applies to other design domains. It is as if the visions described in science-fiction films and books led to expectations about what will happen in the future. The speech will uncover what is hidden behind these reactions.

The talk will address what design can learn from science fiction: original metaphors, anticipation of problems when using new technologies, speculation about peculiar types of material, etc. But the presentation will also deal with design fictions: how design allows making speculative and provocative products to raise questions about social interactions in the future.

We will mention examples such as failed robots, walking architectures or the metaphors that shaped the Internet. Each of them will shed some light on the relationship between science fiction and design.

Weeknotes 108

The week was short because I took few days off in the South of France to relax a bit, read some books, visit old cities and focus on reviewing projects from my students at the University of Art and Design in Geneva (HEAD-Geneva). They basically had to conduct a short field study about a topic of their own, observe people’s practices and produce design implications for this. Some comments about their work:

• The range of research questions was broad: how people behave in conferences, where people leave their cell-phones at home, how people keep track of their todos, how people choose clothes in shops, how people keep track of time. It’s funny to contrast students which are more into the arty side of design and these which are into industrial design projects. While the former literally re-appropriate field study techniques to their own needs (finding ideas), the latter are following the methods to the letter and are sometimes less creative than I expected.
• Although I have shown them various methodologies and insisted on the use of photography, the majority only relied on interviews. Speaking of which, some students still confuses an f2f interview and a questionnaire (paper-based or on-line) but I guess this is linked with my next point.
• 1-2 students are super lazy, which is a classical %
• The toughest part of the job is to produce original, meaningful and creative design implications. Extracting peculiar insights, constant design patterns, issues, problems and potential solution is one thing but turning them into more tangible aspects is difficult. Some proposed interesting conclusions, others carefully crafted personas or use cases while others listed few bullet points. I think I will spend even more time next year on this part to show them how to go beyond the classical formats I’ve shown them.

On a different note, I took plenty of pictures of intercoms (in French they’re called “interphone”). I don’t really know why but it became an obsession in the previous weeks. It was perhaps caused by the fact that the old town in Montpellier featured remarkable instances of these devices. The contrast between the old stone walls and these modern elements made of steel and graffitis was inspiring. The stickers used to indicate new names as well the written information (names, name origins, use of capitals, presence of surname, etc.) seems pretty informative too. At some point, I may use this material in a project about communication and architecture; i still need to find why this is interesting.

Finally, I worked on 3 research papers, trying to pursue academic work in parallel with consulting/conference business. Two of them have been accepted in a design magazine and a HCI conference. The third one has been submitted to a workshop at Ubicomp 2010.

Back to Geneva, I spent most of my time at the Lift offices working on the preparation of the upcoming Lift France 10 conference. I spent time in conference call with various speakers to discuss their speech and discuss communication matters with the local PR agency. We’re almost there.

Lift lab research agency

It seems that these times are quite active with different announcements. As usual, some projects stay below the radar for a while and pop up here and there. Of course, some are bigger than others. Aside from the Lift conference, Laurent Haug, Fabien Girardin and myself created Lift lab, an independent research agency that helps companies and institutions understand, foresee and prepare for changes triggered by technological and social evolutions. We now have what people use to call a “home page“. The services we propose range from exploratory field studies to foresight research, applications prototyping and event-building. We are active in domains such as Web/internet services, video games, mobile and location-based services, urban informatics and robotics/networked objects.

For the record, our logo is made by our friend from our friends from Bread and Butter (with the great Akkurat typeface) and the web design by Maja Denzer.

Upcoming speeches and workshops

Some events where I’ll be speaking at or be involved in as an organizer. Perhaps an opportunity to meet up some readers, I generally do not publicize this but some of you asked me to keep them posted.

Next wednesday (October 21st), I’ll be the keynote speaker at the Swiss E-Tourism Forum in Sierre (Switzerland). My talk will be entitled “the near future of tourism services based on digital traces” (yes, I’ve been asked to give the talk in English, this is Switzerland) and this is the outline:

“Digital objects used by tourists such as mobile phones and cameras leaves a large amount of traces. The phone can indeed be geolocated through cell-phone antennas or GPS and digital cameras take pictures that people can upload on web sharing platforms such as Flickr. All of this enables new application that allow counting tourists or providing them with new sorts of services. Based on existing experiments, the presentation will describe how the tourism industry can benefit from these digital traces to obtain new representations of tourists activities and to build up new services based on them.“

Then I’ll go to Barcelona and join Fabien for the Lift @ Citilab workshop called “Hands on Barcelona’s Informational Membrane” where a great bunch of people will tackle the increasing presence of the informational membrane hovering over Barcelona, exploring the implications (trade-offs, opportunities and concerns) and understanding how it affects the way citizens feel and live their city.

Three weeks ahead, on November 9th, I will organize a lift @ lift offices seminar (quite a name uh) at our offices about the “new digital landscape”. We still have room for people and the event will be in french.

On November 26-27th, I’ll be in Paris (along with Julian, Adam, Jean-Louis, Frédéric and Daniel) for the the new industrial world forum 2009 at the Pompidou museum. I’ve been parachuted in a session about “new industrial objects”, which sounds pretty good. The point of my speech would be to analyze a bunch of networked objects and highlight what how the Internet of Things features certain preconceptions about users. It’s a research project I’ve been working over the summer.

Back to Paris on December 2nd for a workshop at Bell-Labs/Alcatel-Lucent.

December 4th will be devoted to the big workshop day we (lift) co-organize with Council (Rob van Kranenburg) and tinker.it. I’ll be posting more information about this later on.

Paris again in January 2010 for a lecture about locative media at the EHESS for a seminar about transdiciplinarity organized by Antonio Casilli.

And finally (phew), I’ll be at Interaction10 in Savannah to give a talk called “From Observing Failures to Provoking Them”.

Update on Lift09

A quick update on Lift09, the conference is taking shape. It’s 6 weeks ahead, a good list of people registered already and the program is completed (apart from the sustainable evening event) and we are looking forward to have the whole bunch of speakers who will talk about the implications of technologies in society.

Also, for those who want to attend the Lift conference, there’s only one day left before the end of the early bird pricing. And there is still room in the open program with workshops, short speeches and discussions.

Looking forward to it! Lot of work till then anyway.

Towards the next step, leaving academia

Today was my last day at Media and Design Lab and consequently at EPFL. So, I leave academia and… here’s the whole story.

It’s been 5 years that most of my time was spent there (although other ventures such as simpliquity, LIFT and the near future laboratory also took me some time) doing a PhD in Human-Computer Interaction and a post-doc in a design/architecture lab working on various projects. So not it’s time to reflect a bit abut the next step (as Julian did lately).

So, I am leaving academia and there are different reasons for that. The first thing to say is that I am not sure that I want to play the tricks of the academic game which are both about location (“in Europe is usually “you go to certain US universities for 3-X years and find another position somewhere to eventually try to get back”), publication competition and of course specialty/discipline. I guess it’s here that I was a bit frustrated lately. Being a bit interdisciplinary, I don’t know where to sit now: my original background was in cognitive sciences (psychology) and I did a master in Human-Computer Interaction in a psychology department (University of Geneva), and then a PhD in HCI in a Computer Science department (EPFL). My last job (research assistant in a design/architecture lab) also reflect my interest in design research. And in addition, over the course of my studies, I have been interested in having conversations with companies/think tank which turned me into a consultant and a conference organizer for LIFT. This combination of activities and interests have led me to look various overlapping domains (user experience, design research, foresight research, cognitive psychology, anthropology and ethnography, human-computer interaction, usability, etc.) and of course different methods, paradigms, authors, POV.

Looking at these another domains and methods have no doubt changed my practice and modified my interests. The sort of research I was doing 5 five years ago was mostly experimental and quant studies to address psychological implications of technologies. Starting from theoretical models, the point was to test hypothesis (H0 versus Hn), compute inferential statistics, analyse the results, see what they mean wrt to theories and at the end of the day reflect on what this means for engineers or design practitioners (the criticized “implications for design“). Very much cognitive psychology-inspired HCI. I don’t really do that anymore and my research practice has been changed due to different factors:

• Having worked with video game designers in the last 7 years, I learnt how looking or building “implications for design” is different than doing cognitive psychology. I felt that their needs were less about building theories and laws about behavior but more situated account of how their technologies or environment were used, understood, appropriated. Learning more about ethnography and qualitative research was very fruitful for that matter. Of course, this does not dismiss more quant-inferential research but it seemed to me that qual+quant descriptive research was the thing they need at first.
• On the theoretical side, I was also interested in less hardcore cognitive science theories, more alternative accounts of how people make decision, do things together and use/create artifacts. Theories like Situated Action, Distributed Cognition was interesting for that matter although I don’t agree with everything here. But it surely changes the way I want to conduct research.
• Having done research in ubicomp where it’s impossible to carry out studies in a controlled environment (which is the pre-requisite to run experiments), I had to go for more qualitative methods.
• …

Thus, having experienced that (and sometimes tried to make some bridges between different methods or theories), I started to doubt about where I was sitting, what sort of research tradition I’d like to adopt (top-down inferential cognitive psychology? bottom-up descriptive situated ethnomethodology?). And of course, once you’re doubting… you start raising issues or questions that does not appeal to reviewers or researchers from certain tradition. Eventually, I found it hard to get back to ultra narrow-minded cognitive stuff and interdisciplinarity is sometimes recommended however not really rewarded. And i became fed up reading papers in which people don’t know anything about a certain literature/methods/ideas because it’s “out of their field”.

So… this situation led me to to question what I was interested in: circulation of knowledge, innovation, user experience of techniques/technologies, foresight and future research can be relevant keyword in that context. Which can be defined by two vectors:

1. “User experience research”: I know that sounds not very academic and rather practitioner oriented but I find it covers a lot of the issues I like to investigate through field/user studies. It’s about understanding the implications of certain technologies, how they are appropriated, used, deployed, understood, etc. a a micro/meso level (not the whole society level) from a descriptive perspective that can inspire design.
2. “Foresight”: doing scanning, building scenarios, describing alternative futures based on weak signal spotting. This is definitely less academic and more about diffusion of innovation but I am convinced the material gathered in (1) can be useful for this and help defining scenarios for the future. In general, foresight research rather operate at higher level (more macro, with data coming from sociology) but my point is that all these levels can be combined.

What I am interested in, oftentimes, it the cross-pollination between different worlds, making analogies between different domains and drawing issues/solutions/problems/insights form them to enrich the problem at stake. Mapping the overview, defining the problem space, finding opportunities by using various sources: meeting people, having conversations, reading academic papers, annotating books, conducting user research (from usability test to ethnographical studies), taking weird pictures or writing about all of this. This is why I am interested in foresight research since it’s rather about this sort of macro perspective than the more narrow POV of scientific research.

What does that mean for the next? Simply that I will have, from now on, 2 affiliations: being a consultant/conference organizer at LIFTlab and a researcher at the Near Future Laboratory. In the end, it’s about being involved in a “think-tank” stance: smaller, more flexible, less about ivory-tower and silos. That said I will still have one foot in academia through teaching HCI and user experience research in different institutions; and I am still working on academic publications.

We are currently in the process of defining the services we will provide ranging from providing strategic review of projects, writing foresight research report, conducting user studies, organizing workshops (or participating in workshops), lecturing, teaching and organizing conferences. And my focus will remain in my areas of expertise are: urban and mobile computing, networked objects and tangible interfaces. Any interest in collaborating? Need someone like me for a specific gig? feel free to ping me.

In the meantime, thanks Jef and all the LDM team for this fruitful year!

Talk at iMal in Brussels

Currently in Brussels where I gave a talk yesterday at iMal, a center for digital cultures and technology. The presentation entitled “Device art as a resource for interaction design and media art” was about the fading boundaries between interaction design, new media art and academic research. As a matter of fact, the hybridization of digital and physical environments (through locative media, urban displays, augmented reality or mobile games) is explored by a large variety of people and institutions. It’s not only engineers and academic researchers but also artists and designers. The talk looked at why the projects from the new media art/interaction design/device art are relevant and what they tell about the design of future technological artifacts.

Slides can be found on here (.pdf, 20Mb):

In a sense, this presentation emerged from the sort of things that appear on this blog, a mix of pasta (academic or R&D stuff coming from the research world) and vinegar (weirder projects coming form the design/new media art world). It was then about why vinegar is important for pasta. The presentation went through 7 reasons why projects form artists and designers are important, especially for academic researchers and engineers:

“ (1) avantgarde: as they can announce things to come (new practices, new artifacts)
(2) challenge existing practices (for example by highlight new interaction partners beyond the classical and canonical “human computer interaction”: blogjects, animal-controlled video games)
(3) criticize the state of the world by making explicit invisible/implicit phenomena or certain aspects that are hidden (like pollution mapped on cityscape)
(4) address issues in novel way that are not possible in academia or in private R&D: by using fakes, humor or non-utilitarian perspectices.
(5) “breaching experiment”: When trying to predict or design the future of technologies, you can’t just rely on what exist today… you want “disruptions” as the literature about innovation states. So technologies developed in new media art / device art contexts are often DISRUPTIVE platforms that allow to investigate what changes.
(6) arts+design do better to convey desire and emotions (and less mechanistic vision of humans who do not always want automation in their lives for example)
(7) the design process: something is investigated in the construction of hypothetical artifacts, the design process itself is important and bring lessons. A totally different approach than engineering and academic research.“

Thanks Yves Bernard for the invitation.