NID 002


Nicolas Nova by Timo Arnall

Gender · Male

Online Designation · nicolasnova

Cyborg Characteristic · Pen annotations on the hand, next to the watch…

Addiction · Reading stuff off/online; documenting technological garbage of western cities; tracking remnants of phone booths.

Street Machine: technological garbage.

In the cell phone era, phone booths vanish. Picture shot in Mexico.

Function · User Experience and Foresight Researcher both at the Swiss Institute of Technology Lausanne Media and Design Lab, and the Near Future Laboratory (part of LIFT Lab). Editorial manager of the LIFT conference.

Picture taken during his last trip to Japan: kids playing with a Game Boy in an old temple. Nova captured the overlay of high-tech and traditional practices.

Nova graduated with a PhD in Computer Sciences From the Swiss Institute of Technology. He studied life sciences, cognitive sciences (AI, psychology, linguistics, neurosciences) and human-computer interaction.

Most of his latest academic work focuses on researching the implications of knowing partners’ whereabouts in virtual or physical space through location-awareness interfaces. What are the social and cognitive influences of such tools? His PhD work showed how this feature, provided by mobile social applications are not always relevant for group coordination. Automating the exchange of location-awareness might actually undermine collaborative processes by failing to convey the intentionality of communication.

He also investigates the roles and affordances of the physical and the digital space, namely, how do spatial features (e.g. topology, proxemics) influences the user experience? His current research project investigates to what extent spatiality is not as uniform and homogeneous as thought by mobile computing engineers and designers.

Nova addresses these questions in the context of video games and location-based applications (pervasive gaming).

At the Near Future Laboratory, The research he pursues with Julian Bleecker is more exploratory, intuitive and based on prototyping. They deal with topics such as slow video games that take into account physical mobility or creating new interaction rituals less based on type-and-read input/output.

Screenshot: spatial usage of the EPFL campus. This heat map shows the movement of participants of a pervasive game.

Mobility record · Nicolas enjoys the pleasures of cities safari, i.e. wandering around in cities with digital camera and notepad.

Nova’s research engagement with mobility is mostly cognitive, social and cultural: It’s about exploration, discoveries, documentation and the unfolding of new opportunities that may lead to the design of new artifacts.

To Nova, mobile means the easiness of moving oneself through space and time, being light, in the sense that material belongings are no that important and a minimal kit is sufficient to be happy. Mobility is also the fascination for space exploration, discovering new artifacts, practices and myths here and there. As Charles Baudelaire writes in “L’Invitation au voyage,” “Pour l’enfant amoureux de cartes et d’estampes, l’univers est égal à son vaste appétit.” [For the child in love with maps and impressions, the universe equals his vast appetite].

Mobile in terms of space epitomizes the “production of space” in a novel way, the creation of new spatial practices and myths. It also means for us to be able to appreciate this mobility and not being coerced to it by other forces (be they political or economical).

Nova enjoys roaming in “non-places” (the places of transit, in reference to Marc Augé), while dislikes overbooking flight practices!

Kit · A backpack with a macbook, a Suunto Vector watch, a Ricoh GR digital camera, an ipod suffle, a Nokia E65 phone, a Nintendo DS, a notepad, 2-3 pens, the currently-read-book, a camelbak water bottle, toothbrush+toothpaste in a Ziploc. Plus bikes.

Connect · Nicolas [dot] nova [at] gmail [dot] com · http://liftlab.com/think/nova/

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The NID stands for Neo-nomad ID. The concept wants to push the envelop of a classical interview by providing readers clues to reflect on mobilities, and the paradoxes engendered. These NIDs are “tranches de vies”, meaning “slices of lives,” rather than a questionnaire listing projects. They dwell into the intimate and the everyday life of beings to understand better our relationship to mobilities and technologies. Necessarily, because the method of investigation relates more to ethnography than journalism, I felt that visuals were essential to the NID. Also, NID in French means “nest”.

The NID 002 follows the NID 001 with Cati Vaucelle.

NID 001

Gender · Female

Online Designation(s) · Cati Vaucelle

Function · Researcher + inventor, technology and design.

Vaucelle studied economics, mathematics, fine arts, photography, multimedia, computational linguistics, psychology, computer sciences, technology, and product design! She currently is a PhD student and a research assistant at the MIT Media Laboratory, in Hiroshi Ishi’s Tangible Media group.

Vaucelle plays simulation, strategy and role playing games.

Her 63 warrior-engineer WoW character, 2007

Kit · A MacBookPro laptop with internet access, a camera and an iPod. Vaucelle DOESN’T own/use/carry a cell phone! She is exclusively on Trillian and Skype.

Vaucelle wants to design her own gear: a folded laptop with a projector integrated so that she can retro-project from it on a folded white mat or onto any surface. She would like the keyboard and the track-pad to be detachable. She envisions a laptop lighter than a cell phone.

In the city, she travels ultra light (3 keys, a Subway card, a credit card, a student ID card, and few bucks) but she is also an incredible collector: from MP3 to CD and records, comic books, movies, toys… For Vaucelle, objects have a history, hence a deep significance: “I collect and revisit toys that are charged with a period.”

Cati Vaucelle, A toy found in a demolished hotel in Paris, 1998. “If only objects could talk!” she says.

Mission · She explores, designs and implements mutable interfaces to uncover the coexistence of the digital with the physical. This work differs from current considerations of digital and tangible representation. In her work, she allows the digital and the physical to exist independently from each other, and to co-exist in a way that informs one another. This has implications for fields as diverse as architecture, fashion and health care treatment, three areas in which she is currently developing applications.

In terms of projects with a straightforward link to mobilities, Vaucelle created Moving Pictures, a project that involves the use of small, light, ergonomic and transportable cameras. Children could record visual and sound memories using coins to later mix them together, and explore their own narratives.

Children and Moving Pictures, Dublin workshop, 2004. A child recording an instant of everyday life.

As another example, her seamless sensory interventions for the treatment of mental and neurological disorders. Vaucelle researches haptics as the key to bringing treatment into the social sphere through wearable devices, and providing new ways to mediate between the patient and the therapist both in and outside of therapy.

Mobility · Vaucelle implements software and hardware when developing new technology, in addition to conducting research on currently available technologies. In either case, she traverses scientific fields. She is mobile physically and mentally and extremely mobile digitally: she loves to try out/hack/extend the newest digital tool.

Cati vaucelle, Hurt Me, concept model, 2006. In Hurt Me she combined her background in psychology to her explorations in haptics.

In transit, she loves to remove her shoes. It feels good. She hates having to remove the computer from her bag. Vaucelle wishes that by closing her eyes she would instantly turn on the computing capabilities of her computer and drive her computer. She also thinks that being regularly disconnected from a computer for a minimum of a week is refreshing! It is important to realize that we come from natural elements, and feeling the strength of nature is grounding…

On the road from San Francisco to San Diego, CA, 2003

Vaucelle lived in France, USA, and Ireland. She spent long periods of time in Sweden, Brazil, and Canada. She visited many other countries, and among them, Senegal!

Cati in her Parisian suburbs, 2000

Mobile philosophy · According to Vaucelle, teleportation should be the next mode of transportation! Not that she doesn’t love to take the train and ride her bicycle. To be mobile is to have access to any requested services at any given time. Yet, being digitally mobile does not necessarily imply loosing the physical interactions with persons and objects. The digital mobility enables her to freely navigate between being a machine and a physical human being.

Connect: cati [at] media [dot] mit [dot] edu · http://architectradure.blogspot.com/

“Objects in mirror are closer than they appear.”