September 22, Lausanne (Switzerland). I guess sensor-based soap dispensers have been designed in order to provide a touch-free system that is supposedly more hygienic for its users. However, almost everytime I run across such device, there's a little bit of soap under it. It's the messines...
Professional repair shop
September 12, 2017, Lyon, France. An afternoon spent in the repair shops near Place du Pont in Lyon. Although the ones catering laymen are on the main streets, I found this one devoted to professionals. The tinted windows interestingly allude to the opacity of the process and, perhaps, the...
No electricity for you here
July 30, 2017, Geneva (Switzerland). "People always ask us for this, we just can keep up with that." ...
Ethnographic experiential futures
Stuart Candy recently blogged about this design framework he and his colleagues use:"ethnographic futures is more descriptive; looking for what's present but often hidden in people's heads. Experiential futures is more creative; rendering these notional possibilities visible, tangible, imm...
Object repurposing
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On Fadell's regrets and techno-determinism
The other day I read this piece on Fast Company – not an usual website I peruse though – that reported on a panel that was organized at the Design Museum in London. The conversation, was between Tony Fadell (founder of Nest, and who participated in the iPod/iPhone design ten years ago), historian o...
Ethology/ethnography documentation
Although the focus on this book I a bit remote from my research interest, "Ornithology" (by Anne Geene & Arjan De Nooy) is one of the most fascinating kind of printed document that arrived on my desk (my kitchen table actually):"Anne Geene and Arjan de Nooy combine visual tools from the sc...
Imaginaires synthétiques
This blogpost is an entry about a new project I'm working on, in the context of the "NONCOMPLIANT FUTURES" exhibit curated by Nicolas Maigret and Maria Roszkowska (disnovation.org) at Musée du Jeu de Paume (Paris).Intriguing animal-machine collaborations and their design have always been ...
Peripheral ethnographies
(A follow-up to this blogpost, quick notes without the necessary academic framing, for the sake of putting this on the table)Recently, in different contexts, I've been asked (both by researchers and students) about "my approach" in field research... which feels slightly weird because I wasn't ...
Mobile Ordinary Gestures
As I explained few months ago, I'm working on a follow-up to the "Curious Rituals" project. The project focuses on an anthropological perspective on smartphone usage. It's basically a visual ethnography approach and I recently collaborated with Constance Delamadeleine (from Geneva-base des...