How can design methods help visualize potential futures and broaden our perspectives? Can we reveal the unusual and invisible possibilities by prototyping objects and services that do not exist yet?

This is the topic chosen by Anab Jain in her talk at Lift France 10. Following up on her previous appearance, she showed inspiring examples of speculative designs and prototypes made by Superflux, the London and Ahmedabad based studio she founded to explore the implications of technological change on people, society and the environment.

Such projects shed some light on how to create new dialogues between science, emerging technologies and the wider public. Another important aspect lies in the interdisciplinary approach: collaborating with futurists, technologists or hardcore scientists generates a greater chance to find fresh ideas and perspectives on the future.

Related links:
• Anab put her slides and a summary on the Superflux's blog
• [in French] Hubert Guillaud wrote a very complete write-up published in Le Monde.fr.

Tomorrow our ticket shop switches from super early bird to early bird, which means the price will go up by 160chf to 590chf. Don't miss that deadline and get your Lift11 ticket at the best possible price.

You will also be enrolled in our viral tickets system which allows you to get your ticket for less (or free!) by promoting Lift to your network. Find out more on the Lift11 registrations page!

Asia will be one of the topics explored at Lift11. Marc Laperrouza - a two time speaker and active member of our community - writes a blog on China titled Time to look east. Here is an intriguing project he spotted: the super bus, a vehicle that lets traffic flow while loading and unloading passengers.

For an etymological take on super - from latin “supra” meaning above - there is no need to go further than…Shenzhen, home of Hashi Future Parking Equipment.

What looks like a whale swallowing cars is in fact a project to maximize mobility on a given stretch. For now buses are “in competition” for space with cars. The super bus project aims to improve mobility (up to 30%) on a given stretch by superimposing a moving structure on top of the road.

On the one hand this may sound like a good idea given the level of road congestion in Chinese cities. On the other hand one can just imagine the chaos caused by an accident “under the bus”. We will soon be fixed as whether there is any future for the project as the superstructure will soon be tested on the outskirts of Beijing.

Here is a video presentation of the project officially titled 3D express coach:

Related links:
• Link to original post.
• Marc's talk on Mobile in Asia (Lift08).
• Time to look east, weekly column on Chinese innovation and technologies.

We're on a treasure hunt to find a game for Lift11! An innovative, tactical, informative, pervasive game that will add value, joy and fun to next year's Lift. Do you have the idea we are looking for?

Among the post Lift10 comments we had - both in person and in the Frog Design Research - was the idea to propose a game to participants during the conference. A game to make the idle moments more fun, a game to meet other participants, a game to create something.

As Lift11 will host a session on gaming (how game mechanics are now prominent in digital services and products), this is the perfect timing to launch something new. We thought we'd take it one step further and reach out to you to help us source or create a game for Lift11. Whether you're a designer, a small business, or just a game fanatic, and you'd like to get involved or design a game for Lift11, please get in touch - we'd love to hear from you and explore the possibilities.

P.S. If you're looking for some inspiration, watch Ivo Gormley's (a recent speaker at Lift France 10) film - playmakers - about pervasive gaming.

François Grey explained at Lift08 the profound implications of citizen cyberscience for the public understanding of science, and for scientists' understanding of the public. Two years after his talk, François sent us an update on his latest work.

Two years after appearing at Lift, my life has changed completely. I can’t blame that all on Lift, of course! I was about to move a few months later from gentrified Geneva to bustling Beijing, which is a life-changing event in itself. But in some sense giving that talk, to that sort of community, at that particular time, was a turning point for me.

Certainly, it was light years from the typical scientific meetings I go to. I mean, imagine an academic conference where scientists dance on stage during the break to psychedelic music – not likely! And besides being funky, it exposed me to a lot of young people doing really neat stuff on the Web. That was encouraging, because I was trying to get an embryonic project going myself.

So at the end of my talk, I announced the intention to start a Citizen Cyberscience Centre publicly for the first time. I knew I was sticking my neck out a bit, as the center had not been officially approved by the partners: CERN, the United Nations Institute for Training and Research and the University of Geneva. But I had no idea just how many complications we would face getting that approval, both due to management changes amongst the partners, and legal wrangling about the wording of the agreement.

And when the ink was dry on the agreement – which committed no one to spend a centime - we faced the next big challenge: funding! A year later, and after coming perilously close to throwing in the towel a couple of times, we’ve finally made it. I say we, because colleagues like Christian Pellegrini at UniGe and Ben Segal at CERN were enormously supportive the whole while. We now have projects with IBM and HP, and I’ve been awarded a Shuttleworth Foundation fellowship to develop the Citizen Cyberscience Centre further.

So two years later – two and a half, really – we’re about to have our first really big international event, a Citizen Cyberscience Summit, hosted at King’s College London on 2-3 September. It won’t be as funky as Lift, but it will still be cool. Scientists talking with citizens, rather than with each other. Whoa, risky! Who knows, maybe someone will even start dancing on stage? In any case, it is in some sense a godchild of Lift, so thanks to all you Lifters for encouraging that dream to fruition!

Learn more on the Summit here!

We decided to make our speakers radar public. Every time we find someone we would like to invite at a future event, we will publish the details here. Don't hesitate to add to the conversation, especially if:

• you know the mentionned persons, and can help us bring them to Lift
• you know another speaker/project on a related topic

Being mentionned here does not equal in an automatic invitation - many other factors matter in creating a good talk like delivery, language, relevance to the general theme. What we want to do is increase transparency to allow for more involvement of the community in the creation of the program.

Alexander Wiethoff of the Department for Informatics at LMU Munich has developed with the Univeristy of Saarbrücken a mobile device application that enables a radically new form of interaction with buildings.

"By combining a recently developed mobile software application with the multimedia facade of the ARS Electronica building [...] we developed two prototypes: in the first application, users can paint interactively on the building using touch input on the mobile device. In a second application, users are able to solve a jigsaw puzzle displayed on the facade."

iRiS - Immediate Remote Interaction System from awiethoff on Vimeo.

Since Adam Greenfield's talk at Lift07, the growing technologization of cities has been at the center of our interest. The IRIS project is a spectacular mix of different interesting trends: buildings as interfaces, mobile devices as terminals to control other objects, the "gamification" of our environment, etc. Let's see if we can organize a demo of this at a future event!

Related Lift talks:
• Adam Greenfield on the read/write city (Lift Asia 07).
• Yang Soo-In on the living city, what happens if buildings can "talk" with each other (Lift Asia 08).
• Jeffrey Huang on the interactive city (Lift Asia 08).
• Carlo Ratti on senseable city, how data allows to reveal new information layer on top of urban space and or lead to new experience for citizens (Lift09).
• Jury Han's work reminds me of the IRIS project too, a billboard and players using mobile phones (Lift Asia 08).

Lift partner Migros Culture Percentage is a not for profit commitment of Migros (Switzerland largest supermarket chain) in the fields of culture, society, education, leisure and the economy. Through its institutions, projects and activities, it creates access to cultural and social activities for a broad spectrum of the population.

For the fourth time the Migros Culture Percentage tenders work contributions for productions in digital culture. Artistic projects that creatively and innovatively exhaust and further develop the possibilities of digital media may be submitted up to 31 August 2010. The work contributions endowed with 50,000 francs will be announced in October during the Shift festival in Basel. Swiss citizens or artists residing in Switzerland may participate.

Submit your project and receive a grant to make it come true! More information in: German | French | Italian.

Fab Labs are workshops where almost anyone can design and make almost anything. Under the name Fab Labs or other names such as Tech Shops and Hackerspaces, hundreds of shared spaces are providing the means to design, prototype and produce new objects, to create installations, to customize existing products.

Fab Labs are made of computer controlled tools creating rapid prototypes of physical objects - and revolutionizing the fabrication processes. The initial program launched at the Media Lab at MIT in 2007, spread to all over the world. At Lift France 10 the Fab Lab pioneers Adrian Bowyer (University of Bath, UK), Ton Zijlstra (FabLab foundation Netherlands) and Haakon Karlsen Jr. (MIT FabLab Norway) presented their insights.

Adrian Bowyer (University of Bath, UK) introduced the session by presentation RepRap, a tool that is both used and produced in Fab Labs. It is a self-replicating machine made of a cheap desktop 3D printer capable of printing plastic objects. Bowyer showed both the underlying principles of the RepRap and the community tools (such as the sharing of digital designs) and gave an outlook on the legal and economical implications of RepRap.

Adrian Bowyer "The RepRap" (Lift France10 EN)

Ton Zijlstra followed up on the previous presentation by highlighting the community side of Fabs Labs. He presented how the various Fab Lab initiatives in the Netherlands/Benelux area are both unique and complementary: They have their own agenda but also cooperate (see for example the on the Fab Lab conference in Amsterdam or the Fabacademy).

Ton Zijlstra "FabLab Netherlands" (Lift France10 EN)

Haakon Karlsen Jr. presented the MIT-FabLab Norway. He exemplified how a geographic context such as this area in Norway leads to specific design and interests. To contrast this, Haakon presents examples of Fab Labs in Africa and Afghanistan to describe how other places' constraints lead to different rapid prototyping.
As of July 2010 there are already 45 Fab Labs in 16 countries including Afghanistan, Kenya, Ghana, Costa Rica and Columbia!

Haakon Karlsen Jr. "Fab Labs network" (Lift France10 EN)

The Lift@home season is back. One month from now (on September 26), there's going to be a one-day workshop in Hungary in the Eastern Quartier of Pécs.

The Lift workshop in Hungary sets the scene in the Eastern Quartier of Pécs at a historical coal mining site. As European Capital of Culture in 2010, Pécs attracts international attention as a cultural pole on the periphery of the European Union. Departing from this context Lift @ Eastern Quartier addresses the possibilities of new technologies in the socio-cultural periphery of a changing post-industrial urban landscape. It turns this particular locality and its challenges into the centre of the attention of architects, artists, social scientists from the region and from regional media labs with the objective to explore and connect with recent discussions regarding urban computing and extend the discourse to specific regional issues. The workshop will address the implications of urban information systems for architecture and urban design.

Speakers will include: Violeta Bulc, Marcus Foth, Christophe Guignard and Martijn de Waal. See the detailed program here.

The workshop is organized by our friend from Kitchen Budapest media lab in partnership with the Hungarian Contemporary Architecture Centre. For those who attented Lift09, KiBu participated in the Lift Experience exhibit.

Here we go again! After a successful and inspiring 2nd edition of Lift France on the Mediterranean Sea we are now planning the upcoming 6th edition of Lift in Geneva: Lift11 will be happening Feb 2-4 2011 !

What can the future do for you?

^{Russell Davies on the Lift10 stage. Photo by Ivo Näpflin.}

The program of Lift11 will be built around a central question: what can the future do for you?. What are the current opportunities created by innovation? What usages observed on the other side of the planet could inspire the development of new services in your context? What are the ideas that will disrupt and shape tomorrow's society?

In a world changing at an unprecedented pace, Lift11 will help you stay in touch with the most important people and ideas, those that will impact us in the coming one to three years.

Lift11 topics and sessions

• Touchpoints: from Facebook to FourSquare: how social networks are integrating mobile and geolocalization.
• Digital innovation in Asia: social media, gaming and communications from the continent that represents 42% of internet users.
• Human-computer interfaces: what comes after the touch revolution.
• Ubiquitous computing: connected objects and urban technologies.
• Transactions: virtual currencies, monetizing privacy and reputation.
• Future corporations: the new organizations and jobs.
• Creative thinking: the best ideas from various fields and cultures.
• Stories and new frontiers: our traditional session dedicated to inspiring stories from people with extraordinary projects and lives.

New in 2011

Based on your precious feedback in the Lift10 survey and on the design research conducted by frog design, we are working on the following:

• Feedback and interaction system. More interactivity, an improved feedback system to allow for better interaction with speakers.
• Parallel tracks by theme. We will prepare parallel tracks of keynote speeches and workshops. Choose to explore the theme of your choice. The working titles for the three tracks are currently Technology, Creativity and Business. Each track will offer a mix of keynote speeches, workshops and discussions.
• Co-creation Workshops: following the success of the Lift10 workshops, we will expand and develop our offering at Lift11. Besides the community based workshops, there will be focus workshops (with a call for papers on a specific topic) and co-creation workshops. We will offer comprehensive coaching to all workshop organizers, and the formats will be labeled more clearly (lecture, demo, co-creation) to allow you to chose the format or activity level you prefer.
• New formats, entertaining presentations and varied sessions. Lift11 will feature fireside chats with emerging thinkers and doers, live interviews on stage based on audience questions, the traditional 20 minutes expert keynotes, short community talks (open stage), demos and playful performances.

Of course we will keep the Lift classics such as the fondue, long breaks and the unique, diverse, and inspirational mix of participants and speakers.

Tickets: unbundled and viral!

This year we unbundled the participation fee and logistics in the pricing to offer you more flexibility.

• With the unbundled price model we aim to sustain the diversity in our audience by keeping the ticket price as accessible as possiblem and offer you the flexibility to buy just what you need
• The price for the complete Lift package including 2.5 days with lunches, cocktails and the fondue stays basically the same - except we have to add the Swiss VAT (7.6%) this year.
• Big news: we will be selling daily tickets for thursday and friday as of Oct 1st
• Last but not least we have included a viral ticket option which allows you to get your ticket for less (or free!) by promoting Lift to your network.

The very early bird tickets are on sale, starting at CHF 430 (EUR 315/USD 407/GBP 260). They are available until August 31st, so take this chance, grab your Lift11 ticket now.

Thank you for your fidelity and support for Lift by registering early :)