A chapter about the kinds of investigations/inquiries designers put together in their work, in the book by Atelier Luma, celebrating their ten years of design research.

Nova, N. 2023. Les designers-enquêteurs et leur singularité, Pratiques biorégionales de design — Bioregional Design Practices, Arles: LUMA, pp. 149-152.

July 28, 2022. Located at La Mitad Del Mundo, the Quitsato Sundial is a place that shares various aspects of the astronomical knowledge of the prehispanic cultures of the region. Not far from the monument built to commemorate the first Geodesic Mission of the French Academy of Sciences), it provides an interesting perspective to the Museo Etnográfico Mitad del Mundo. The term “Quitsato’, which means ‘middle of the world’, comes from the pre-Incan Ecuadorian coastal language, Tsafiqui.

The Musée de l’Imprimerie et de la Communication Graphique (Lyon, France) currently has an exhibit about Susan Kare’s work. Kare, who’s an American artist and graphic designer best known for her interface elements and typeface contributions to the first Apple Macintosh from 1983 to 1986. The exhibit examines different aspects of her practice, and what influenced her:

“Three major influences can be perceived in relation to Susan Kare’s drawings. Firstly, the prehistory of comics, from the first half of the 19th century, with caricatures by Rodolphe Töpffer in Switzerland and Gustave Doré and Honoré Daumier in France. Next, the typographic creations of the major foundries in the 1920s and 1930s, from companies such as Brüder Butter in Dresden, or the Fonderie Typographique Française and Deberny et Peignot in Paris, who sometimes drew inspiration from alphabets created in cross- stitch, arguably the ancestors of digital pixels. Finally, Susan Kare has learned a great deal from three contemporary mentors: the graphic artist Paul Rand who has created logos for IBM, NeXT and ABC, the comic books theorist Scott McCloud with his best-known book Understanding comics (1993) and the Swedish pop art sculptor Claes Oldenberg. (…) Using a grid of 32 x 32 small squares, she began to give shapes and faces to the keywords and commands of the prototype of the computer built by Apple. Doctor of Arts from New York University (her home town), specialist in sculpture and 19 th century French caricatures, Susan Kare had a very definite idea of the effect she wanted to create: clear type-style and icons, expressive enough to make an impact but not so dominant as to distract, rather like motorway signs or a viewpoint indicator. And so she used her artistic background to develop a universal, playful, joyful grammar and vocabulary, no doubt unaware of the extent of the impact which this language, this sign language, was to have on the period and on the history of design”

Why do I blog this? This is the first international retrospective of Kare’s work, and I quite enjoyed the mélange between pieces from her historical collection (about the Macintosh, NeXT and more recent things) and medieval pieces, curious fonts, pixel arts, Minitel sprites, korean characters, emojis and byzantine icons. It’s an interesting way to show the mutual relationships between some of these cultural elements. Examining them side by side is insightful, and the Museum is quite an intriguing place.

January 6, 2022 (Solaison, France). Two trees, two different species. The one in the background is a mobile phone mast, designed as a tree. The locals think it looks like a “morille” (morel) mushroom, but they reported how it was helpful for kids during COVID lockdown (zoom calls and on-line schools).

In Nantes for Sens-Fiction at Lieu Unique curated by Ramy Fischler and Scott Longfellow.

An exhibit that investigates how fiction influences our conception of future practices; in this laboratory, designers’ methods are informed by the desired outcome. This exhibition also examines what fiction brings to future-use foresight: literary, cinematographic, advertising, and future-focused works, as well as designers’ projects, are placed side by side; they serve to reveal how we live in the world. Ramy Fischler and Scott Longfellow’s multidisciplinary approach led them to invite several personalities to intermingle. Whether they are exploring science fiction, speculative fiction, social-science literature, the relationship between brands and fiction, or speculating about tomorrow’s world through design, these enthusiasts enriched the exploration of the interrelationships between fiction and usage.

Along with Patrick Gyger, Irène Langlet, Daniel Kaplan, Nicolas Minvielle, and Claire Luna, I was part of the curating team. The website also features more material about this project we conduced back in 2020 for another exhibit for Lille World Design Capital.

Designed by Swiss studio Fragment.in, Paraboles ulx-56834 is “a sculptural, kinetic and sound work that proposes an analogy between the theme of breath (spirit) and waves - mainly electromagnetic - by bringing together their free, disruptive and sometimes demystifying character.” Displayed in the St-François church in Lausanne, it features a dismantled 21-meters antenna, with rotating sound systems that broadcast various audio pieces made by artists, a theologian, a media archaeologist (hi Yves!) a scientist and myself. Definitely a fascinating project, and an intriguing place to exhibit such kind of work.

Illustrating Shannon Mattern’s notion of “infrastructural tourism”, my piece offers a guided tour the satellite antenna complex based in Leuk (Wallis). An occasion to combine my work about digital technologies with my recent interests in Alpine worlds. Thanks David, Laura and Marc for this opportunity to work with you!

September 3, 2021, Skyway Monte Bianco (Courmayeur, Italy). The upper station of the cable car, feels like a spaceship dock (or the back of a fishing boat as mentioned by my friend Matthieu Duperrex). This big metal construction and the sky here made me think of Bespin, the cloud city of the Star Wars universe.

August 28, 2021. Quick a long hike to Mont Buet, near Chamonix in the French Alps with the Laboratory for the History of Science and Technology (Swiss Institute of Technology, Lausanne). Thea idea was to reenact a scientific expedition made in in the 18th Century by scientists from Geneva (Deluc, Saussure, Pictet and Bourrit) with a group of researchers and artists (Pascale Favre, Olga Cafiero and Joëlle “Verveine” Nicolas) as well as Stéphane Fischer, the curator of the Musée d'Histoire des Sciences. Fischer brought two replicas of Deluc's 1770 barometer (picture), as well as several other scientific instruments.

Why blogging this? Aside from taking this as an opportunity to visit a mont that I’m less familiar with in the area, the idea is to produce a scenario about this for the Chamonix role-playing game I’m working on with Sabrina Calvo and Etienne Mineur.

Why blogging this? I wish I had known this as an undergraduate students. Perhaps epistemology classes vanished before I started my bachelor program, but I wonder why this kind of texts are not mandatory reads…

• Robodebt : a neologism that corresponds to debts that appears when welfare services wrongly demand the repayment of benefits because of automated fraud detection algorithms failures. Although it can be found in the US and in European countries, the term comes from a debt recovery program in Australia that falsely accused members of the community of owing money to the Government. (Source: Algorithm watch )

• Rubber band effect: in video games, the rubber band effect in dynamic game difficulty balancing, where computer-played characters with a more severe disadvantage are harder to beat and vice versa. Also refers to this undesirable effect of latency in which a moving object appears to leap from one place to another without passing through the intervening space; also called "warping" or "teleporting" (Source: Wikipedia).

• Cyber Doula : “Being a cyber doula can take multiple forms, including demystifying internet jargon by reading terms and conditions for loved ones, or sending helpful articles to friends that encourage them to ask more introspective questions.” (Source: bitchmedia.org via Katharina Sand). See also the work of Olivia McKayla Ross.

• Numérasse : a French neologism that describes the annoying and massive amount of digital forms (online or pdf) that one has to fill for bureaucratic reasons (Source this blogpost by Florence Maraninchi). The suffix “-ass” is often employed in French for terms with a negative connotation, feel free to create odd Frenglish idioms based on that (and please send me your proposal).

Some quotes I enjoyed:

"We must change to see the world change"
"Impossible to tell how fast society was collapsing because history had been riddled through with disinformation, and reality was composed of half-fictions and full-on paranoid conspiracy theories."
"Those of us who survived the pandemic, and all the rest, passed through so many different worlds. Like time travelers. Some of us lived in the past. Some in the present, some in an unknowable future.[...] So we stitched our way through what remained of life not so much in bubbles but in varying levels of unreality. Even as past, present, future lived in all of us. The wounds deeper. The disconnect higher."
"Fires, floods, disease, nuclear contamination, foreign wars, civil unrest, police brutality, drought, massive electrical outages, famine. It accumulated, oozed in around the cracks in our day-to-day. Always over there. Always somewhere else."
"What is the world like after the end of the world? Is there a hummingbird, a salamander? Is there a you?"

“As I continue to read about the challenges around us, I have decided that’s not enough, we also gonna have to tell stories where we’re not winning, where there's just terrible things happening and we might not win, and I know anthropologists have been very critical of those kind of stories, particularly as paralyzing, as leaving one dead-end. Then it’s gonna be a challenge, how do write those stories in a way that they’re not paralyzing, that they bring us to life, that we notice the details, all that art of noticing is in there, that we ‘stay in the trouble’ as Donna Haraway puts it, that we get involved, so that’s our challenge. So that rather than saying don’t do it, I think the challenge of our time is: ‘how do we tell terrible stories beautifully.’”

Why do I blog this? This quote corresponds to Tsing’s answer to the interviewer’s questions about the importance of hope in anthropological narratives. I find it interesting with regards to different projects that I’ve been working on for few years, like the Bestiary of the Anthropocene, as well as my alpine inquiries.

“Printed in silver ink on black paper, this field guide to our new world of hybrid specimens catalogs the conflation of the technosphere and the biosphere Plastiglomerates, surveillance robot dogs, fordite, artificial grass, antenna trees, COVID-19, decapitated mountains, drone-fighting eagles, standardized bananas: all of these specimens—some more familiar than others—are examples of the hybridity that shapes the current landscapes of science, technology and everyday life. Inspired by medieval bestiaries and the increasingly visible effects of climate change on the planet, Swiss-French researcher Nicolas Nova & art collective DISNOVATION.ORG provide an ethnographic guide to the “post-natural” era in which we live, highlighting the amalgamations of nature and artifice that already co-exist in the 21st century. A sort of field handbook, A Bestiary of the Anthropocene aims to help us orient ourselves within the technosphere and the biosphere. What happens when technologies and their unintended consequences become so ubiquitous that it is difficult to define what is “natural” or not? What does it mean to live in a hybrid environment made of organic and synthetic matter? In order to answer such questions, Nova & DISNOVATION.ORG bring their own research together with contributions from collectives such as the Center for Genomic Gastronomy and Aliens in Green as well as text by scholars and researchers from around the world. Polish graphic designer Maria Roszkowska provides illustrations.”

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 Design, funded by the Swiss National Research Fund. The book can be bought at IDP Publishing or found here as a free/open access pdf at this URL.

Here’s the book blurb:

“Dr. Smartphone,” “Mobile City Center,” “Docteur IT,” “iklinik,” “La clinique du téléphone cellulaire,” “Phonetime,” “iPhone clinique,” “Smartphone clinique,” “Phone services...” These are some of the names of a new type of business that has appeared in towns and villages in the past ten years: smartphone repair stores represent the most visible element of this ecosystem, but similar practices can be seen in hackerspaces, Fab labs, and temporary venues such as repair cafés. The services provided vary, but they tend to focus on the material elements of the hardware. Though the problem or issue is usually with the device’s hardware, repair technicians may also be able to address software issues; overseeing updates, changing settings, installing applications, or adding software and accessories not supported by manufacturers.

Drawing on a two-year field study in Geneva, Lausanne and Zurich, this book focuses on these independent repair stores and hackerspaces, and the practices of their technicians. How do these individuals come to end up fixing customers’ devices? How do they learn to handle products that were not designed to be repaired? And what can the mending of a cracked phone display tell us about skill, innovation, and the use of technology?

In this book, Nicolas Nova and Anaïs Bloch argue that a greater understanding of maintenance and repair is both timely and urgent, a fundamental part of any attempt to meet the challenges of an era of environmental crisis and consumer waste. An inquiry into “mobile repair cultures” presented through portraits of individual repairers, this book highlights users’ efforts to improve the sustainability of their technical objects.

At the intersection of anthropology, STS and design, this book is an investigation of smartphone repair places (shops mostly, some hackerspaces and repair cafés) in Switzerland. Designed by Raphaël Verona and Aude Meyer de Stadelhofen, we chose a format that mixes various kinds of material (photography, bande-dessinées, observations) for each repairers’ portrait, and a more standard academic text to introduce the approach and discuss the findings. The idea being that several kinds of readers may be interested in this: the research participants, designers and engineers involved in smartphone design, and, of course, scholars in social sciences or design research. It can be ordered on the publishers’ website at the following address.

Thanks Justin Pickard for his tremendous help on proofreading the manuscript. Laurence Allard, Jan Chipchase, Jérôme Denis, Matthieu Duperrex, Benjamin Gaulon, Fabien Girardin, Marie Goyon, Marc Laperrouza, Hervé Munz, Clément Renaud, Maria Roszkowska, Yvan Schulz, Bruce Sterling, Anne-Catherine Sutermeister, Jasmina Tešanović, Mathilde Bourrier and Dominique Cardon for their comments and support, as well as all our interlocutors and all the anonymous maintenance priests/priestness we ran across. Thanks Thierry Hausermann for being interested in publishing this odd document :)

• Birchpunk : portmanteau word made of “birch” (birch tree) and “punk” (for cyberpunk) that designate a contemporary form of cyberpunk technological imaginary located in the countryside (Source: Birchpunk YouTube).

• Stacktivism: a term coined by Jay Springett “that attempts to give form to a critical conversation & line of enquiry (infra-spection?) around infrastructure & the relationship we have to it.” (Source: #stacktivism)

• Nonograms (aka Picross, Griddlers, Pic-a-Pix, Logimage) : picture logic puzzles in which cells in a grid must be colored or left blank according to numbers at the side of the grid to reveal a hidden picture. (Source: Come Internet with Me).

• “To Gloom” : “verb indicating deception in online teaching with Zoom where most, if not all, the participants are represented by a wall of black tiles with merely a name or a picture, not necessarily theirs. Situation generalised mostly following the coronavirus pandemic situation of 2020 when most courses were shifted online almost overnight not allowing for a proper redesigned pedagogy” (Source: via Jean-Henry Morin)

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-style co-ops, garden cities, universal basic income and services, job guarantees, refugee release and repatriation, climate justice and equity actions, first people support”

“media anthropology (Coman & Rothenbuhler 2005; Postill 2009), media ethnography (Horst et al. 2012; Murphy 2011; Murphy & Kraidy 2003), cyber-ethnography (Hallett & Barber 2014; Keeley-Browne 2010), virtual anthropology (Reid 2012; Weber et al. 2011; Weber 2015; Wong 1998), virtual ethnography (Hine 2000), digital anthropology (Horst & Miller 2012), digital ethnography (Murthy 2008; Underberg & Zorn 2013), netnography (Kozinets 1997; 1998; 2002; 2006), social media ethnography (Postill & Pink 2012; Postill 2015), and networked anthropology (Collins & Durington 2014)”

Why blogging this? It’s interesting to understand these nuances and define my own perspective.