Our work

Our work

Our work leads to the creation of prototypes, publications and provocations that make people think. They offer knowledge and know how on global challenges and emerging technologies. Refined over more than 15 years, our approach is multidisciplinary. It is about mixing creativity and imagination with logic and structure. We bring doubt, curiosity and our academic background in design, social sciences and engineering to analyze the nuances of the world and explore its potential futures.

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Digitization of cities

  • Map of Geneva for autonomous vehicles is a city map from the future intended to kickstart a public dialogue on urban policy and the future of autonomous vehicles.
  • La Rue de demain is a look at the future of Lyon from street-level—how the innovations and upheavals of newly adopted technologies might affect the everyday urban landscape over the next ten years.
  • To spark a conversation around the larger questions regarding a world of autonomous vehicles, we created a Quick Start Guide from the near future of the self-driving car.
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Environmental changes

  • E-Miliz is a military service booklet from the near future. It offers a way to experience the Swiss militia system in light of potential technological changes and inevitable ecological crises.
  • As part of the foresight programme of armasuisse Science and Technology, we prototyped a whole organization called Swiss Resilience International Support (RESINT). Its missions to harness the knowledge of Swiss nationals abroad and support the country’s resilience.
  • Futures in Maps is an atlas that tell stories about a world we all might experience soon. Each map showcases the potential everyday consequences of global scale challenges such as climate change, labor automation, access to clean water and renewable energy production.
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Digital cultures

  • 6andMe was a prototype that analyzes your online activity and social-media accounts to diagnose invented pathologies.
  • Curious Rituals is the study of the gestures, postures and digital habits occurring in the digital everyday.
  • A Digital Tomorrow is a film speculating about the future of digital gestures.
  • Humans was a prototype app that rationally managed your too-many contacts and deliberately slows your consumption of updates, tweets, selfies, etc.
  • Smartphones is an anthropologic study based on fieldwork carried out in Geneva, Los Angeles and Tokyo. This book looks at the meanings that users give to their smartphones, and how their use has transformed our daily lives over the past decade.
  • Winning Formula is a football tabloid from the future, when big data has transformed the sport.
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Artificialization of our environment

  • The Bestiary of the Anthropocene is a field guide to our new world of hybrid specimens catalogs the conflation of the technosphere and the biosphere. A work in collaboration with Disnovation and edited by Onomatopee/Set Margins.
  • In Fragments d’une montagne , Nicolas Nova delivers a kaleidoscopic survey of changes in the Alpine Arc. The book suggests ways of thinking about new forms of solidarity, new ways of inhabiting the world and repopulating our imaginations.
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Definition of know-how

  • We are known as pioneers of Design Fiction. A practice that combines local observations with global weak signals and prototyping techniques to create popular objects accessible to anyone. We co-authored The Manual of Design Fiction a guide to that practice, its origins, its utility and its impact.
  • Sketching with Data is a practice of quick data manipulation and visualization coined by Fabien Girardin
  • Prototyping in Data Science is the practice of data science that is about exploring ideas that do not have a shape yet. It is about being curious, testing assumptions, looking where no one else is looking, and above all, it is about understanding what to do instead of following the current tech culture of ‘cranking stuff out’.
  • The art of observation is our essential ingredient to keep attune to the changes in the world. Nicolas Nova wrote Exercices d’observation (in French) for others to learn from his observation strategies.
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Curation of exhibition