New book! A Bestiary of the Anthropocene Hybrid Plants, Animals, Minerals, Fungi, and Other Specimens Edited by Nicolas Nova, DISNOVATION.ORG. Introduction by Nicolas Nova. Text by Geoffrey C. Bowker, Alexandre Monnin, Pauline Briand, Benjamin Bratton, Michel Lussault, Pierre-Olivier Dittmar, The C...
New book! Dr. Smartphone: An Ethnography of Mobile Phone Repair Shops
Pleased to announce the publication of our book, Dr. Smartphones: an ethnography of mobile phone repair shops, at IDP, written by Anaïs Boch and myself. It’s the conclusion of the Mobile Repair Cultures project that we conducted between 2016 and 2019 at the Geneva University of Art and Des...
Digital parlance #76
Vampire appliances: appliances that use electricity even when they are off as these are often in standby mode such as a TV, a home assistant or anything with a timer. Smartphone and PC charger also use power even when they are not being charged, still plugged into the wall.Birchpunk : portmanteau w...
The Ministry for the Future
An interesting read last week : the latest novel by Kim Stanley Robinson. And this list of what he calls “the good projects”, that can be seen as a sort of initiatives he believes in for a more habitable near future: “regenerative ag, landscape restoration, wildlife stewardship, Mondragón-...
A lexicon of ‘buzzword ethnography
Preparing a class at Sciences Po Paris about how to conduct on-line ethnographic research, I ran across this fascinating notion of “a lexicon of ‘buzzword ethnography’ described by Crystal Abidin and Gabriele de Seta in their paper about digital ethnography and its discomforts:“media anthropology (...
Digital parlance #75
Cellular humanities: “the cellular humanities are precisely about that to which we are not paying attention: the ubiquity of these small computers that more and more people have, as well as a cluster of mentalities, behaviors, and attitudes that develop along with the machines. They’re about how th...
Atlas of Contemporary Networks
The other day, looking for a book in my (messy) shelves, I found this Atlas of Contemporary Networks that Marco Ferrari send me a while back. A publication from the MA Communication Design programme at IUAV Venice, it was designed during Graphic Design Lab led by Marco Ferrari and Ivor Williams. A ...
"Write a fake first page, two ways"
On her blog Sara Hendren gives this very sound advice for PhD students:“Write a fake first page, two ways. I studied with a prolific historian who, at the outset of a new book project, would write a fake first page. You tell yourself: I don’t know what this book is really about, but if I did know, ...
Digital parlance #74
Algo-friend: a friend met via a recommendation algorithm, from de Facebook to Tinder or LinkedIn. The term undoubtedly go beyond the notion of online contacts, and the sometimes simplistic accusations of "faux-friendship" about them.LMGTFY: acronym for Let me google that for you (Source ce tweet).D...
Vocabulary of display
Found in “The Essential Guide to Electronics in Shenzhen” by Andrew ‘bunnie’ Wang (2016)Why blogging this? The vocabulary described here correspond to multiple nuances that we often neglect/forget when using our digital devices. ...