Lift Conference

Alain Renk "Unlimited cities"

Mon, 29 Aug 2011 10:17:22 GMT

Alain Renk describes "Unlimited Cities", a participatory platform used by architect to enable citizens to change their neighborhood. A rapid prototyping tool, this service aims at allowing people to bring their ideas and react to architectural or urbanistic proposals in a situated way.

Robin Chase "Building the cities of the future: People empowered (by...

Fri, 26 Aug 2011 09:02:03 GMT

Cities were once constructed by the efforts of individuals, until the grand plans of master architects, and then city planning departments took over, making sense of the "chaos." The city of the future will be both globally connected and highly local and customized -- once again shaped primarily by the individuals living within it. This new power will include sustainable local economies and be thanks to the miracle of the Internet combined with fast, easy access it to through ubiquitous mobile devices and sensors throughout our environment.

Tobie Kerridge "Debating Biotechnology – Speculative Design as Public...

Wed, 24 Aug 2011 09:59:10 GMT

In this speech, Tobie Kerridge describes the "Material Beliefs" project, a design research project with a focus on a speculative approach to biotechnology as a form of engagement with the public.

Paul Wicks "Putting patients at the center of healthcare; disruption in...

Tue, 23 Aug 2011 10:17:55 GMT

The current disruption in healthcare corresponds to the fact that patients can access tools to gather information, aggregate data, act, and see results reflected in real-time. In his speech, Paul Wicks presents the consequences which can be listed as follows:
Medicine: Patients are more engaged with managing their own illness, receive better outcomes / resistance from medical community in some quarters
Research: Patients can find out about clinical trials going on anywhere in the world and participate online or even carry out their own research programs - increasingly being viewed as credible in the peer-reviewed world
Business: Payers want to pay for improved outcomes, not transactions. The pill must be shown to be more effective than existing alternatives in the real world, not just a placebo in a controlled trial.
Safety: Patients can submit their own safety events in real-time and enter in to a dialogue with manufacturers about how to improve their products.

Frédéric Mazzella "How car-pooling can help forecast car traffic"

Fri, 19 Aug 2011 15:10:00 GMT

Carpooling consists in sharing a car on a similar trip. Drivers publish their available seats with a price, and passengers buy seats for home-to-work carpooling (on a day-to-day basis for a distance of around 20km) and long-distance carpooling (one-off trips or week-end round-trips for distances of 300km in average). The speech focuses on how to forecast car traffic based on car-pooling platforms with visual representations.

Adam Greenfield "On public objects: connected things and civic...

Tue, 16 Aug 2011 10:09:00 GMT

This talk explores some of the issues that emerge around networked information-collecting objects in our public spaces, and to frame a taxonomy of such objects from the unobjectionable (due to local effect and a clear public good associated with them) to those that ought to be causing us significant concern (no public benefit, global impact, pernicious second-order effects).

Saskia Sassen "The Future of Smart Cities"

Mon, 15 Aug 2011 10:21:56 GMT

A leading researcher on globalization, global cities and new technologies Saskia Sassen discusses the current hype around smart cities. She reminds us that “It is the need to design a system that puts all that technology truly at the service of the inhabitants—and not the other way around.”

Florence Chee "Localizations of global games: cross-cultural lessons"

Tue, 14 Jun 2011 10:52:03 GMT

What happens when global games meet local culture? In this talk, Florence Chee discusses the idea of games as a medium of communication and how it may look the same or different depending on where in the world you may find yourself. How do factors like culture, social structure, and infrastructure affect how people play online games in different global contexts? Drawing from ethnographic studies of games from all over the map, game designers, engineers, or cultural theorists will be interested in this discussion of the contingent factors that arise from public and private game play that is sometimes not about the game at all.

Memi Beltrame "The free view on Art that anyone can edit"

Wed, 08 Jun 2011 10:04:20 GMT

What is Art ? In a witty presentation Memi Beltrame introduce his project Artypedia.
Artypedia is a Wiki located at http://artypedia.org Its point is to challenge the general understanding of what art is. Artypedia features selected articles from the Wikipedia, with the main term of the article replaced with the term "art".

Jennifer Gay "Google Translate, Skype conferencing, and the future of my...

Mon, 06 Jun 2011 16:07:49 GMT

Jennifer has been behind the scenes - or rather tucked away in a booth - at Lift for the past 4 years. Listening to and interpreting speakers talking about how technology is changing - and will continue to change - how we work. Will it change how Jennifer works? And in the mean time, can some of the speakers get a clue about how complicated it is to follow them? A brief history of conference interpreting, the fun of the present, and how things might change for interpreters!

Alp ICT Venture Night

Mon, 06 Jun 2011 10:20:53 GMT

Alp ICT hosted their third venture night during Lift11. Following the successful 2008 and 2010 experiences that saw eight startups present in front of the audience, more startups were given the chance to accelerate their development by presenting their ideas, products and services to the Lift community. Here are the 8 companies invited to present at Lift11: actracsys, L'Avenue Digital Media, nviso, Geoli.st, NEXTthink, ShopAlive, publiwide and Voice on a Cloud.

Yasmine Abbas "Neo-nomadism"

Wed, 01 Jun 2011 10:04:40 GMT

To soothe the stress of travel, today’s mobile individuals (neo-nomads) engage in tactics of re:location, recreating an image of home but producing a lot of waste. The spaces /objects designed with mobility in mind should focus on bringing comfort to the neo-nomads while addressing the issue of waste.

David Calvo "Beyond transmedia"

Mon, 30 May 2011 12:33:14 GMT

How to built your own cosmos ? In a whimsical attempt to eradicate the narrative debate from the game design process, David Calvo defines an ethic of development, an “affectionate anarchism” leading back to the original source driving creation on any support: poesis.

Alex Osterwalder "A new approach to designing business models"

Mon, 30 May 2011 12:31:00 GMT

Alex Osterwalder is the best-selling author of Business Model Generation. He tells us how organizations start approaching the challenge of designing business models in a radically new way. Companies learn how to test their business models upfront, iterating on the feedback received from their clients, thereby reducing the risk of failure.

Lucie Green "Researching and studying the sun"

Wed, 25 May 2011 10:14:15 GMT

The Sun is our closest and most important star, and is important to study because of its major impact on our planet, and therefore on our lives. This talk looks at the latest global research into solar activity and the stunning imagery provided by international spacecraft which reveal the Sun at its most dramatic.

Nick Coates "Co-creation: present and future"

Tue, 24 May 2011 09:40:52 GMT

Nick Coates of Promise Communities explains the fundamental rules that make co-creation possible. He shows how an idea that has been around for decades is being put back into the spotlight by communication technologies, and tells the audience what to expect for the future of this re-emerging discipline.

Tara Shears "An update on the Large Hadron Collider project"

Tue, 24 May 2011 09:40:17 GMT

The Large Hadron Collider, one of science's most ambitious project ever, is producing headlines a few kilometers from Geneva. Tara Shears gives us an update on the recent findings (including the creation and capture of antimatter!), and tells us what to expect from the LHC in the near future.

Jennifer Magnolfi "Programming space habitat"

Wed, 18 May 2011 10:05:21 GMT

Jennifer talks about the design process for space habitats, how designers and engineers approach the creation of space habitats for the extreme conditions offered by life in micro-gravity environments.

Vlad Trifa "What about a web of things?"

Mon, 16 May 2011 10:03:45 GMT

The Internet of Things (IOT) has been portrayed as the ideal solution to many problems in various disciplines. After describing the problems with our current approaches to build the IOT, Vlad proposes his refined version of the IOT vision - the Web of Things.

Sabine Hauert "Robotics today"

Fri, 13 May 2011 13:08:24 GMT

Sabine is a researcher from the EPFL specializing in robotics. Her presentation explains how robots are changing the way we live and work, with more autonomous and intelligent machines coming to us in the near future. Sabine closes her talk by explaining the legal and ethical challenges facing this growing industry.

Marcel Kampman "Reinventing schools - project Dream School"

Thu, 12 May 2011 10:40:31 GMT

What if you could reinvent a school from scratch? What would you change, how would the technologies that reinvent education impact the construction and design of the building? Marcel Kampman is taking over that challenge in the Netherlands, and share the story of "Project DreamSchool".

Brian Solis "Social currencies"

Mon, 09 May 2011 09:50:50 GMT

Brian Solis discusses the notion of social currency, how the activity we have on social networks helps build an important asset: social capital.

Tiffany St James "How to encourage involvement in online communities"

Fri, 06 May 2011 14:59:22 GMT

Tiffany talks about how people are using online communities to galvanise like-minded participants into action and what we can learn from grass-roots community collaboration to support our own endeavours.

Chris Heathcote "The invisible communities"

Wed, 04 May 2011 10:44:23 GMT

After a brief history of community building on the Internet and how this has changed as web bulletin board and forum communities have become the place for communities of interest to gather, Chris looks at how communities can emerge even without the foresight or wish of the site operators.

Hasan Elahi "Giving away your privacy to escape the US terrorist watch list"

Mon, 02 May 2011 10:06:44 GMT

Hasan tells us his incredible story: he was suspected of terrorism by the FBI by mistake, and ended up living totally in public to protect himself from surveillance. His talk shows how forfeiting your privacy can in fact become a new form of protection of your identity.

Claude Nicollier "The reality of space"

Thu, 28 Apr 2011 10:51:37 GMT

Astronaut Claude Nicollier - with four trips to space under his belt - share his experiences at the international space station , working on the Hubble telescope , and his visions for the future of space exploration.

Kevin Slavin "Those algorithms that govern our lives"

Wed, 27 Apr 2011 15:48:04 GMT

Digital technologies and on-line platforms are essential to the way we work and live. Interestingly, they are defined by algorithms which are not neutral. Kevin discusses how they define new social norms and how our culture is affected by the possibilities embedded in the softwares we use.

Steve Portigal "Discover and act on insights about people"

Sat, 09 Apr 2011 12:11:00 GMT

What do customers want or need ? A permanent concern for entrepreneurs, designers, marketers and others seeking to innovate. Steve discusses methods for exploring both solutions and needs and he explores how an understanding of culture (yours and your customers’) can drive innovation.

David Galbraith "Four trends for the digital world"

Tue, 29 Mar 2011 10:00:00 GMT

David Galbraith is a former architect turned internet entrepreneur. He helped incubate Yelp.com and was one of the authors of the RSS 1.0 specifications. He talks about four trends for the digital world: people vs. celebrities, people vs. robots (recommendations from friends replace algorithmic results), people powered design (consumer Internet products are better than professional ones) and public vs. corporate networks.

Simon Redfern "The Open Banking Project"

Sat, 26 Mar 2011 20:13:07 GMT

The Open Bank Project is a European initiative to open up financial transactions to much larger groups of individuals and raise the bar of financial transparency. It will achieve this by allowing a diverse range of third-party software applications (including fraud analysis tools, web apps, mobile apps, social widgets and payment gateways) to access any bank account that supports the Open Bank Protocol and API.

Matthias Lüfkens "Twitter democracy"

Tue, 15 Mar 2011 10:30:34 GMT

Twitter is the preferred channel for quick banter for over 175 million users around the world including our political leaders. Over half of the heads of states and governments of the G20 meeting in Seoul on November 11 and 12 have an official Twitter account (http://twitter.com/Davos/G20).
Some like @BarackObama have 5.5 million followers, while others such as the French Presidency only have 6,600. All other G20 leaders are somewhere in between and yes, you’ve guessed it, none of them tweet personally. What’s interesting though is not who has the most followers, but rather who follows who.

Azeem Azhar "Online communities and reputation management"

Thu, 10 Mar 2011 23:53:00 GMT

With billions of people who can connect with each other almost instantly, the community is global - even smaller communities are global in scale. In a market of voices, how do you help people 'Connect Better'? What you want to build is a lingua franca, a common currency that allows reputation to be portable.

Ben Hammersley "What does the internet bring to the concept of a country?"

Sun, 06 Mar 2011 20:40:56 GMT

With the internet, the concept of the nation-state as something bounded by distance is beginning to die. We now have many nations within each other, bounded by culture and values. Ben will be asking what the internet means for geopolitics, international relations, war and national security.

Jean-Claude Biver "The importance of innovation and thinking different"

Mon, 28 Feb 2011 09:06:17 GMT

Entrepreneur Jean-Claude Biver, famous for his work at Hublot, talks about innovation, creativity, and his philosophy that can be summarized by three commandments: "be the first, be unique, be different".

Lift11 timelapse

Sun, 27 Feb 2011 23:04:52 GMT

Lifted Up! Participants of Lift Conference 2011 pour into the main auditorium at the CICG in Geneva. Photography by Ivo Näpflin; Music by Loveshadow ft. Snowflake & Alex Beroza.

Don Tapscott "MacroWikinomics"

Wed, 23 Feb 2011 13:54:18 GMT

"What an amazing time in human history. Among other things, there is a revolution in revolutions. Up until three weeks ago [during the events in Tunisia], all revolutions throughout history had leaders..."

Don Tapscott talks about the new age of networked economy, and how collaborative innovation is deeply transforming our society as well as our institutions. Why not open source government, education, science, energy production or even health care as new models of collaboration?

Dorian Selz "Virtual organizations"

Sat, 19 Feb 2011 22:47:19 GMT

Dorian Selz's companies are great examples of what could be deemed virtual organizations. Flat hierarchies, less management, geographically dispersed teams are all part of his daily life with local.ch and now Memonic. He will share his experience on how new technologies are reshaping the way our organizations function.

Thomas Sutton "Creating space for open innovation"

Thu, 17 Feb 2011 10:24:48 GMT

What happens if we stop trying to understand consumers’ needs, and start cultivating empty spaces where people can innovate for themselves? In other words, letting go of the dream of a perfect, scientific innovation process by which products or services could "fulfill unmet needs".

Yuri Suzuki "Music for dyslexic"

Thu, 17 Feb 2011 09:31:50 GMT

Artist Yuri Suzuki talks about his experience with dyslexia, approaching music for dyslexics and presents his "Color Chaser 2010" project.

Steffen P. Walz "The lowdown on "gamification""

Thu, 17 Feb 2011 09:20:45 GMT

With the advent of gamification, we've seen a recent proliferation of points, badges and other game mechanics in lots of on-line services. Based on various projects, Steffen offers an insightful and critical perspective on how game design is not just about forcing users to earn points…

Robert Scoble "Trends and Projects from Silicon Valley"

Tue, 15 Feb 2011 17:18:03 GMT

Robert Scoble shares his latest discoveries (as of February 2011) while checking out start-ups in Silicon Valley and Western Europe. A technical evangelist and author, he's best known for his blog, Scobleizer.com.

In this talk, he argues that we're in a tech bubble again, at a point when several start-ups had raised several million dollars. But we need to consider what are the drivers this time round? Smartphones, huge growth in social media platforms, and new customers using emerging platforms.

Philippe Gendret "Monetization of media"

Tue, 15 Feb 2011 16:28:20 GMT

Readers are slowly but surely migrating to digital reading, but what are the realities of usages of mobiles and tablets? How can media monetize their content and find a sustainable model on the free internet? What are the challenges facing editors in the digital world?

Alexandre Bau & Birgitta Ralston "The story of a unique workplace: Transplant"

Tue, 15 Feb 2011 16:27:53 GMT

In 2003, Parisian designers Birgitta and Alexandre decided to build their dream of a cross-competent creative workspace in an isolated village of Norway. This radical choice gave birth to a global collaborative experience of a new type where issues of sustainability and social awereness become central.

Attila Bujdoso "How to remix architecture?"

Tue, 15 Feb 2011 16:05:43 GMT

It is surprising how new concepts arisen from technological developments have so little impact on the architectural practice. Deeply inspired by presentation formats like Pecha Kucha, the project 'Remix Architecture' addresses this question and aims to develop a new concept of architectural competitions.

Caecilia Charbonnier "From Ballet Dancing to 3D Hip Simulation"

Tue, 15 Feb 2011 15:59:25 GMT

In this 5 minutes talk, Caecilia Charbonnier presents her research on studying the potential damages on joints created by extreme sports activities. In collaboration with the Grand Théâtre de Genève and the University Hospital of Geneva, she captures the movements of dancer Cécile Robin-Prévallée to recreate a 3D model that allows a fine analysis of which parts of the body are put to contribution.

Honor Harger "Listening to the sound of space"

Tue, 15 Feb 2011 15:23:39 GMT

Honor Harger is working on broadcasting what Pythagoras and Johannes Kepler called "the music of the spheres", the "sounds" that extra-celestial bodies like the sun or planets produce. Her project Radio Astronomy allowed thousands of people to emotionally connect with space in a new way.

Etienne Mineur "The paper book as a new computer platform"

Tue, 15 Feb 2011 12:44:12 GMT

If you're interested in how designing old fashion paper book can be transformed by video game mechanics and computing technologies, you'll be intrigued by Etienne's talk. The work he show is about creating “Paper Video Games”, mixing paper in either books or board games with the digital world.