What role can designers play?: James Auger, from the Auger-Loizeau design studio, presents various examples and cases of critical and speculative design removed from the commercial standpoint. His projects in robotics, implants and mobile services, should be seen as provocative and discussion-generating pieces.

Less ↑

Less ↑

The past and future of the Internet: "Father of the internet" Vint Cerf shares his vision on the future of the network he helped build from the ground up in the 1970s. "I'm coming to you from the Jurassic period," says Cerf. (Also available in French.)

Less ↑

Update on Wikimedia Foundation: Florence Devouard, who was the Chair of the Wikimedia Board till July 2008, gives a quick update of the situation at Wikipedia. She shows the recent evolution and initiative of the collaborative on-line encyclopedia.

Less ↑

Less ↑

Less ↑

Memoires of a magnificent future: 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

Less ↑

Lift09 introduction: Laurent Haug, founder of the Lift Conference, opens the Lift09 conference and introduces the events' program.

Less ↑

Soft Infrastructure Superpowers: Dan Hill, from urban engineering firm Arup, revisits the past vision of the city of the future and shows they turned out differently. He discusses the important interplay between urban soft infrastructure (people, networks, culture, society, civic relationships) and hard infrastructure. Which leads him to the role of design thinking in developing this new layer information/services based on personal informatics.

Less ↑

Learning to play with Tomorrow: Anab Jain, who is an independent designer and film maker from India, talks about "design futurescaping", which is using design methods like storytelling, experience prototyping, making scenarios tangible, and talking to people on a daily basis, to inspire and influence prototypes for the near future.

Less ↑

The Future of Fake: Fake products are certainly an important trend from the last twenty years. Trendbüro analyst Jörg Jelden describes why fakes are so successful and more importantly what they do differently as well what brands can learn from the fake industry.

Less ↑

Lifestyle Experiments: Working at the crossroads of contemporary art, science, and engineering, Natalie Jeremijenko shows various projects of hers related with environmental issues. Each of them exemplifies a peculiar aspect of her approach that aims at addressing the transformative potential of new technologies in unexpected ways.

Less ↑

The Recurring Failure of Holy Grails: Lift conference editorial director Nicolas Nova revisits technological failures from the past ranging from the videophone to the intelligent fridge. He then describes the reasons behind them and shows that failures can be turned into successes as shown by the videophone, which has now resurfaced on platforms such as Skype.

Less ↑

The role of design in sustainable development: Oriol Pascual from Enviu Innovation Lab in Rotterdam describes several projects and initiatives that show the role of design in the creation of innovative solutions for environmental or social issues. In particular he focuses on his studio's work with regards to new sources of electricity production such as the generation of electricity through a dance floor.

Less ↑

The Sensable City: Carlo Ratti, director of the Senseable City Lab at MIT, shows various projects he and his lab conducted around the theme of sensed data (mobile phone, flickr pictures) and how they allow to reveal new information layer on top of urban space and or lead to new experience for citizens.

Less ↑

Less ↑

Creative communities: Soh Yeong Roh, director from Art Center Nabi in Seoul, gives her perspective the importance of spirituality and art as a way to question the values of our technophile culture. Based on her experience and a strong south-asian flavor, she shows how art can create "creative communities" that can work as engine for social development (socio-cultural-economic) for our knowledge based society.

Less ↑

Enchanted Objects - How fiction foreshadows innovation: David Rose, who is a serial entrepreneur and a lecturer at MIT, shows how human beings have persistent needs and wishes that they carry through time. For each of these needs, he presents various prototypes and products to demonstrate how design can lead to "enchanted objects" by fulfilling them.

Less ↑

Globalism, Mobiles, & The Cloud: Juliana Rotich, an author, blogger and digital activist with Global Voices Online in Kenya, talks about citizen journalism in African countries. Starting from web examples, she then describes the value of mobile applications in this domain. Her presentation gives a broad overview of the issues at stake in mobile activism/journalism.

Less ↑

Design Thinking: Fabio Sergio, Design and User experience strategist and creative director at frog design, focuses his presentation on Design Thinking and its role in creating habitable and desirable futures. He shows various examples to explain how people-centred design goes beyond usage or consumption and should be about culture and seeing people how people react to things within their own culture.

Less ↑

Considering how digital culture enables a multiplicity of knowledges: Ramesh Srinivasan, an Assistant Professor at the University of California Los Angeles, speaks about the importance of cultural differences in knowledge production and technology design. Through various stories, he shows the differences in cultural appropriation and the inherent creativity of people in adpating technologies to the uses that benefit them best.

Less ↑

Less ↑

Less ↑

Scientific fiction: 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.

Less ↑