Sorry for the silence here but the last few weeks have been super hectic because of various projects. So, as a quick summary of what I’m up to:
- I just finished writing the French manuscript of a book about the history of game controllers. It’s called “Joypads! Le design des manettes” and it’s going to be published in January 2013 by Les Moutons Electriques (The Electric Sheeps), a Lyon-based editor. The book is a joint project with Laurent Bolli from Bread and Butter/OZWE in Lausanne.
- With the laboratory, we organized a workshop in Detroit called “To Be Designed” that focused on “ the hands-on, pragmatic ways in which one can imagine and then create things from and for the near future.” It was a great event and I still have to publish my notes.
- The Print-On-Demand version of the “Curious Rituals: Gestural Interaction in the Digital Everyday” book is almost ready. We had to spent some time fine-tuning the last bits.
- The school year resumed and I’m currently preparing different courses at the Geneva University of Arts and Design. There’s going to be a workshop at the end of the month about design and ethnography, in which we’ll focus on urban animals. There’s another class at EPFL about design process, and a seminar class about the history of interaction design. On top of that, I have 6 masters students for whom I’m a masters thesis tutor.
- At the design school here in Geneva (where I work part-time), I just received a research grant for a study about the relationship between ethnography and interaction design. More about this later.
- Raphael Grignani and I are working on a week-long workshop at ENSCI-Les Ateliers in Paris.
- For a client, as a follow-up to last summer’s field study about car-sharing in the US, I’m going to do a series of interviews and observations in Switzerland. For another client in Madrid, there’s also going to be a workshop about digital data in November.
- There are several talks lined up in the near future (UX Paris, a game-related conference in Hamburg, a design lecture in Edinburgh, the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Boston) but I’m accepting less and less of these. Mostly because my schedule is a mess and also because it’s hard to be productive (or relaxed) when always on the road.
- After organizing half of the program at Lift France, I’m taking care of three sessions at Lift 13 and will do a workshop there about urban bricolage.
Phew… and that’s why there’s less time to blog.