Back from the field, Amsterdam where I stayed at the Lloyd hotel designed by MVRDV, the renowned Dutch architecture firm. I really did like the concept of the Lloyd: it is a 1 to 5 stars hotel, meaning that budget and business travelers mingle. Art brings everyone together:

The hotel’s Cultural Embassy offers various services in communal spaces. Situated above restaurant the Cultural Embassy informs guests and interested parties on topics such as art, culture and cultural projects. In conjunction with the Lloyd Hotel the Cultural Embassy and its members organize projects and cultural activities: performances, small exhibitions and presentations. Admission is always free for everybody.

Some rooms have kinetic architectural elements: cupboards open up to disclose and create a proper space for a bathroom. One advice, make sure you don’t get a room located in the basement!

Cupboard door opening up to give proper space to a bathroom (surface area saving…).

While in Amsterdam I have met with the food designer Debra Solomon, curator of The Edible City exhibit:

The exhibition presents a cross section of pragmatic proposals and utopian schemes that enable cities and city-dwellers to meet their own food requirements. They range from MVRDV’s Pig City and Agroparks to the urban agriculture Cuba found it necessary to develop after the collapse of the Soviet Union. As befits the subject, much of the exhibition is itself edible.

Check Debra’s culiblog!

Studies we conduct are like dyed cloths, those which pigments tint the skin of whom wears it (not unlike the indigo cloth of the Tuareg, the blue man of the desert…). They change us.

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/

*

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.

Cowardice or selfish practicality for the one making the move, many of us have experienced a technologically mediated breakup, the phone call being a boring classic, now it happens through text messaging. My friend N. witnessed worse: a tape sent via mail! No way to answer directly to that one… is there? Is breaking up on the move the way to go? Spying technologies also seem to facilitate the resolution of many divorce cases. Read: Your cheatin’ heart leaves tell-tale e- trail:

Most of these stories do not end amicably. Earlier this year, a technology consultant from the Philadelphia area, who did not want his name used because he has a teenage son, strongly suspected his wife was having an affair. Instead of confronting her, the husband installed a $49 program called PC Pandora on her computer. The program surreptitiously took snapshots of her screen every 15 seconds and e-mailed them to him. Soon he had a comprehensive overview of the sites she visited and the instant messages she was sending.

It is as if technologies amplify the worse of us. Un peu de courage, de panache et de romantisme que diable!

Article in the Economist, Home Truth About Telecoms. Technology and Society: Anthropologists investigate the use of communications technology and reach some surprising conclusions:

Of course, improvements to mobile networks and the spread of third-generation (3G) and Wi-Fi networks mean that you no longer need to be at your desk to get things done. But Ms Broadbent found that there is not, in fact, much appetite for working while on the move. Indeed, she calls this “the hypermobility myth”. After studying workers who spend more than half their time out of the office—salesmen, consultants, pilots, journalists and photographers—she found that they generally stick to communications while on the move, gathering information that they then work on when they get back to their desks. Hotel rooms and airports are, she says, “not seen as an appropriate environment for substantive work” and are mainly used for e-mail.

Met kids gaming in the Commons… In light of my interest for the Freedom Trail, I asked what it was. Urban Interactive is:

Blending mobile technology, improvisational actors, and theatric props, Urban Interactive creates immersive tourism adventures that suffuses the player’s real surroundings with a “heightened reality” of intrigue, mystery, and adventure.

Business Week, Sept. 10, 2007

Digitization? The entire network runs on software known as Jovial, so old there are only 6 programmers in the country who know how to write it. And incredible as it seems, family minivans with NavStar have more sophisticated location guidance than some aircraft.

Via archilab.org:

La mobilité est aussi celle des habitants. Dans les projets d’Architecture-Principe, entre 1963 et 1968, le sol se soulève, et le plan oblique génère une architecture du déplacement. Le principe majeur de la fonction oblique est celui de la “circulation habitable”, rendue possible à travers les plans inclinés, le sol artificiel et les systèmes de rampes. Parent et Virilio parlent alors de “dérivation” dans les villes obliques. La fracture du plan détermine la fonction oblique. Dès 1966, année de la construction de l’église Ste Bernadette du Banlay à Nevers, - monolithe fracturé en béton brut -, l’architecture se transforme en “plaques topotoniques” mouvantes dont l’inclinaison incorpore le déplacement physique de l’habitant. Cette dimension gravitationnelle de l’espace a, encore aujourd’hui, des répercussions dans le développement récent des architectures cognitives, espaces artificiels animés qui interagissent avec l’habitant ou leur environnement (Nox, Oosterhuis, etc). Avant sa rencontre avec Paul Virilio, Claude Parent avait déjà exploré la fracture du plan, l’instabilité à travers le basculement de cubes ainsi qu’à travers ses premiers dessins de Turbosites et de Villes-cônes. Paul Virilio avait, quant à lui, déjà mené des recherches sur les bunkers de l’Atlantique. Tous deux fondèrent ainsi le groupe et la revue “Architecture-Principe” qui développa la fonction oblique à partir de la “topologie des surfaces orientées”. La plupart des dessins et maquettes des projets expérimentaux d’Architecture-Principe seront exposés.