New industrial world forum

6, May 2010  |  Published : Seminars  | 

Since 2007 IRI, the competitiveness pole Cap Digital and the ENSCI (National Superior School for Industrial Creation) join once a year to organize the New Industrial World Forum.

The first edition of this Forum initiated a reflection on the rising issue of new forms of ascending innovation as defined by Eric von Hippel, rooted in collaborative technologies, both from the point of view of design and industrial conception. The spread of digital technologies offers an environment to this evolution, along with the generalization of cultural and cognitive technologies and « transformative » technologies such as biotechnology or nanotechnology.

In 2008, the second edition of the New Industrial World Forum’s theme was « Social Networks, Social Engineering and Innovation ».

The third edition of the Forum took place on November 26th & 27th and focused on the « Smart Objects » (or New Communicating Objects).

The 2010 edition will be focused on nanotechnologies and will took place at Centre Pompidou on december 14th and 15th.

27-11-2007: Opening speech

  • Agnès Saal, Centre Pompidou Managing Director
  • Alain Seban, Centre Pompidou Chairman

27-11-2007: Outline of the new industrial world

Daily life in the XXth century was deeply affected by the important role gradually reached by design in the industrial production : art itself, which became with modernity an exploration of all potentialities, has made breaches in all directions and formed a functional relationship with industry that would lead toward a global transformative process as technological as cultural. This process which conferred an economic vocation to the aesthetic life became reality, when the public relations (which would later become marketing) » invented » in the USA the consumer and his attributes. From now on, as capitalism is more and more qualified as cultural, conception (in an open meaning, as scientific research, toward new economic and political models of socialization, as design and artistic creation) is at the heart of the industrial process – within what is called the industry of knowledge, the knowledge society or the cognitive capitalism. The possibilities offered by technology appearing limitless, the end-of-the-line consumers of these products and services are less and less satisfied with a passive role of client or user and a rising number wants to become more of a contributor and a practitioner – that is, also, come back to being more of a citizen. This is the context in which we want to redefine the research / development / design / marketing / distribution linear circuit.

27-11-2007: Amateurs, social link and specialization

The first economic sector where these transformations become concrete concerns the new medias. This sector has been born from the convergence of cultural and cognitive technologies integrated within digitalization. Social engineering and the technologies for individuation are growing on the Web, as it becomes a participative universe where amateurs exchange content – for both the best and the worst : the amateur can also turn into what japanese call an otaku, when user profiling at the service of hyper-segmentation increases desindividuation. On an ominous perspective, a syndrom of cognitive saturation is poisoning the information systems and attention deficit disorders are becoming more and more common. Yet, in the same time, as the technologies for self-production and self-broadcasting become more and more accessible we witness the rise of a new form of instrumented attention, active because of its participative quality, which academic Katherine Hayles calls hyper-attention.

27-11-2007: New design methodologies

In a technological world becoming more and more participative, the consumer as a practicer can no longer be thought as a mere « end user ». Technological research and design must integrate him much earlier in the production line by putting new methodologies in action, as « process design », while the role and the responsibility of the designer keeps on taking more weight in the conception process. In this context, the cognitive technologies are calling toward new theoretical and methodological models, from the « experimental phenomenology » from the COSTECH team (UTC), to what we might call today a cognition of attention. Through these attempts, we witnessing the emergence of a new methodology for design open to active and instrumented practices by opposition to a simple consumption uses.

28-11-2007: The challenges of micro and nanotechnologies

The extreme miniaturization of technologies and the growth of wireless connections are seamlessly but radically affecting the relationships between human bodies (and their brains), as they become bearers of upgrading sophisticated technological functions, surrounded by the industrial devices which constitute the world they live in. This mutation of their technosocial environment induces a transformation of the very conditions around the socialization of individuals. Thus, the trend in research has been shifting from the study of materials (which was the major trend for research on applied physics), to the immaterials (the devices and systems organizing the circulation of informations, which were mediatized by Lyotard and displayed at Centre Pompidou as early as 1986) and is now reaching the notion of nanoplasticity which upsets the traditional distinction between shape and matter. Through this nanoplasticity are formed hypermaterials which are said to be nanostructured, with qualities very distant from what is found in nature. This is pushing the boundaries, on an ethical or even cosmic level, of the issues surrounding design, as it becomes a total activity.

28-11-2007: New interfaces, multi-modality and question of the body

As soon as hominization started, our sensorial organs have been constantly associated with technical systems (technics of the body at first, mnemonic tools), and then technological ones (machines, devices, chips, intern prosthesis) and from these interactions between senses, circuits have been formed giving way to symbols, thoughts, objects, products, services and social organizations.
The actual trend toward multimodal (as multi-sensorial) interfaces is taking the body back to the centre of the digital world, and these interfaces only prefigure situations which will be generalized by the development of micro and nanotechnologies. The growth of virtual space and time linked to digital technology (and we may already object that every space that is not « where I am » and every time that is not « the present time » are virtual) seemed at first to lead toward a disembodiment of the bodies, but we are now witnessing the return of the body as a central consideration, while the transformation of our living environment through transformative technologies open the issues of digital, micro, bio and nano-technological ecologies, where virtuality becomes an hyper-reality.

28-11-2007: Communicating objects, participative and pervasive web

Mobile technologies and extended communication between objects are the most socialized aspects of a trend that seems to lead to a real embodiment of industrial artifacts operated by the individual minds : we might be witnessing a reversal of the process philosopher Leroi-Gourhan qualified as the « technical externalization of human » (as a delegation of his vital functions toward the technical). Thus, this convergence of transformative technologies and pervasive environments could very well secede from a 2 million years long process during which hominization proceeded toward externalization : in front of what could be an « anthropological rupture », one might ask to what extent this reversal will conserve not only individual integrity, but also the sociability upon which are built collective organizations. Functions, which essential to the constitution of any human collective, like spatiotemporal markers are now creation a niche for support-services and assisted living, in which the most sophisticated control technologies may be injected.
A huge transformation is at stake, concerning our very organs (from the organs of the body to artificial ones, unto social organizations), where the essential question its capacity to create a social link – rather than individuals under control.

28-11-2007: New economic, juridic and ethical models

These mutations are at work while the cultural industries and entertainment industries which have been the pillars of the XXth century’s consumerist society are facing an unprecedented crisis : from TV-broadcasting to the written press (which was vital to the constitution of the Republic of Letters, as al Gore recently underlined it). The society around digital networks is shifting from mass audiences toward the hyper-segmentation of publics – and we have already discussed the problem of desindividuation which might arise then. A key element is the generalized indexing every physical or intellectual object, which is becoming possible through RFID chops and the globalization of a new IPV6 internet protocol whose combinatory power would make theoretically possible to encode every atom in the universe. We are witnessing the direct relationship of the engineering of metadata with the elementary structures of matter, which deploys in turn its very quantic nature through energy and information : the opposition form/matter is becoming outdated. But the duplicating possibilities offered by those ever more accessible technologies are also radically questioning the basis of a juridical principal which supposed the right to property as the basis for investment. Thus, this last meeting of the Forum will take in account the revolution underlying the development of the Free software movement and the broadcasting of contents under a Creative Commons license : we will move on to the question of new economic models through the juridical, ethical and society questions they raise.
In other words, the community surrounding the Free software movement will be perceived through the angle of design, to understand whether or not this community knows how to treat the practical questions of non-developers.

28-11-2007: Conclusion

Design and ascending innovation

This first edition of the New Industrial World Forum took place between November 27 and 28, 2007, and took on the challenge to offer a proper reflection on the issue of ascending innovation, linked to collaborative technologies, from the point of view of design and industrial conception. We are witnessing the rise of digital technologies as cognitive and cultural technologies, at a time when transformative technologies (biotechnologies and nanotechnologies) are emerging.
The mutations resulting from these processes, and the contradictions that ensue make it necessary to re-think the practices of design, and R&D, as well as their implications from a social and economic point of view. The industrial model we inherited from the XIXth century, which after WWII led toward the planetarization of the consumer society, seems today to be reaching its limits and simultaneously offer new possibilities – by turning around the opposition producer/consumer (especially in the digital world), and by giving to both still and living matter a plasticity unthinkable until now.
The linear sequence research/development/design/marketing/distribution seems to become out of line and new forms of social organizations are required : it is manifest through the quick growth of the Internet in all directions, and the popularity of participative medias. When the possibilities in the manipulation of matter, bio-manipulation and the use of informations become almost infinite, design (in its most open meaning) turns into an activity « shaping » the social. This extension gives it both new perspectives and unprecedented responsibilities – as exciting as overwhelming.
A new relationship between our daily uses and industrial conception is taking form. To watch over this birth and collectively take care of it are among the ambitions of this Forum. This is our attempt at a renewal of the relationships between knowledge and industry, to foresee the outlines of the new industrial digital and cultural industries.

3-10-2008: Opening speech

3-10-2008: Psychology and social networks

Since the origin of the psycho-analytic theory we know that desire is inscribed within a knot of social relationships. And in the last decades we know that these traditional social relationships have been upset, or « deterritorialized » as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari would put it, when they have not been shunted by the introduction of new technological networks in the industrial world. Yet, the emergence of « social » networks seems to reformulate the question of the distribution of desires, of social relationships, of care and attention. They enable pathological tendencies, like addiction, but they also deeply change and affect the condition of attention and care, for example through what Katherine Hayles calls « hyper–attention ».

  • Bernard Stiegler, Director, IRI / Centre Pompidou, Desire and social relationship at the age of social engineering
  • Antoine Masson, Professor, Centre Chapelle-aux-Champs à Bruxelles, Louvain and Namur Universities, technological mediation and mediation of desire and transference during adolescence.
  • Elizabeth Rossé, Psychologist, Hôpital Marmottan, Desire and addiction within technological mediation

3-10-2008: Anthropology and social networks

What we call social networks in the Internet world relies on the formalization of social relationships, more or less explicitly, through digital technologies. The protocols of these networks lead the user to self-describe and self-index his own social personality, producing schemes of social relationships by self-generated metadata – consciously or subconsciously. This is why it is a « social » network. This leads somehow to an automatization of relationships, through a process which makes them explicit, and as a consequence deeply transform them. This change is so profound that we have to ask if a new kind of « social consciousness » (as a sense of belonging) will be able to emerge from it, as a kind of critical consciousness, or if it can lead to the dissolution of the social relationship. We have to analyze both those dimensions : the dynamic potential, and the potential reification obtained through social networks on a socio-anthropological point of view.

  • Dominique Pasquier, Sociologist, research director at CNRS, a new generation looking for the social link.
  • Dana Diminescu , teacher-searcher at Telecom ParisTech, scientific director of the TIC Migrations FMSH Paris program : the appropriation of social networks by migrant populations.
  • Debate
  • Richard Harper, Principal researcher, Microsoft Research, Cambridge, A sense of body : how digital preseence is shifting the relationship between bodyliness and human identity ?

3-10-2008: Economy and social networks

The development of social networks occurs in a context where the classical model of industrial economy (relying on a « top down » organization) is challenged in various ways. A participative marketing is emerging in both a hectic and hesitating way, while a global financial crisis is growing to such proportions that some economists, as André Orléan, are exploring the hypothesis of a trade (an organization of exchanges) which would not be solely based on the relationships of the markets. In this context, there’s a necessity to find new economic indicators both qualitative and rational. If « branding » has ruled over the last decades, by influencing and weighing in social relationships, one can wonder whether the age of social networks will offer possibilities beyond an economic model based on brands. Are the social technologies getting closer to be assimilated to both economic and managerial knowledge, and politic strategy ?

  • Michel Gensollen, searcher at the Economic and Social Sciences department of Telecom ParisTech : The economy of mediatized communities.
  • Bernard Benhamou, delegate to the Uses of the Internet from the Ministry of Higher Education and Research.

3-10-2008: Industrial and technological challenges of the social networks and the collaborative Web

This session will be co-organized with INRIA and Institut TELECOM to offer a panorama of the technologies at work, and present future prospects at short and long range in the field of the industries of social relationships, or digital social networks. It will deal with the issue of the network infrastructures enabling the emergence of these social technologies, and the weight of the discussions around the Internet protocol (IPV6). It will also replace those networks in the larger context of an economic and entrepreneurial activity based on interpersonal technologies.

  • Olivier Auber, director at Cultural Lab A+H/Anoptique : The challenges of IPV6.
  • Francis Jutand, scientific director at Institut TELECOM : The collaborative technologies.
  • Serge Abiteboul, director of research at INRIA Saclay (Ile-de-France) : Managing data in social networks.
  • François Bourdoncle, co-founder of Exalead : Exalead’s development model in the context of social networks.

3-10-2008: Carrefour des possibles proposed by FING

Discover digital uses relating to social networks and collaborative technologies. Meet the team leading those projects
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4-10-2008: Individuation, control and social networks

The very conception of those social and interpersonal technologies is becoming structurally more and more social and interpersonal. The feedback from practices on specification has become a major dynamic element. But we can still question the way the format of these data are conceived and the primitive functionalities enabling this feedback : these can be put to the service of a psychic and collective individuation assisted by a computer as well as they can support the desindividuation of individuals, and an occult control by the numerous technological means of traceability (cookies, communicating objects, geolocalization, etc.). R&D, design and distributed marketing are to be considered as the key to that emerging knowledge formed by the strategic technologies of social engineering.

  • Alain Mille, university teacher, research director (Equipe Silex, Laboratoire Liris UMR 5205 CNRS) : The concept of M-traces or modelized trails.
  • Jean-Louis Fréchin, Designer-Architect (NoDesign.net) – Director of the Atelier de Design Numérique ENSCI-Les Ateliers : « You are here », digital cartography and mobility.
  • Pierre-Antoine Chardel, senior lecturer, Head of the research group « Ethic, Technologies, Organisations, Society » at Institut TELECOM : Nomadism, control and loss of individuation.
  • Marc Davis, Chief Scientist and Director of ESP, Yahoo! Connected Life, Yahoo! Inc.

4-10-2008: Social networks and politics (eDemocracy and public debate)

The growth of social networks takes place in the more global context of the generalization of the reticular society, where the traditional hierarchies are put to the test and where unforeseen means of social organization appear, relating to political, economic or even police and military power – for example the way biometry is intertwining with the digital social technologies. In this context, many socio-political models are prospected and generalized from specific situations that have been witnessed through the acts of hackers and the Free software movement. But how can these already dated events help us to visualize the upcoming social and interpersonal technologies expanding with the use of social networks ? What kind of planetary geopolitical perspectives do they indicate ?

  • Pekka Himanen, philosopher : The ethic of hackers and the networks.
  • Ken Wark, Chair of Culture and Media Studies at Eugene Lang College and Associate Professor at the New School for Social Research in New York City : Interpersonal technologies as political technologies.
  • Alexander Galloway, Associate Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication (New York University), Géopolitique des réseaux sociaux.
  • Scott Lash, Director, Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths, University of London, Networks and democracy in China.

4-10-2008: Final discussion with the guests

Social Networks: Cultures, Politics, and Engineering

This second New Industrial World Forum wants to deepen the discussions begun in 2007 on ascending innovation and the implications of design in our presumably cultural and cognitive capitalist era. We suggest that this year’s forum develop the concepts of Social Networks and Social Engineering within a technological and economic environment generated by an ever present Web 3.0.
The first day of the Forum is dedicated to the sociological and psychological dimensions of social network, and will provide an overview of existing and emerging international technologies and strategies in the industry. The second day will focus on economic and organizational consequences as well as the opportunities of social innovation, and how they can be used as political leverage, without neglecting the potential dangers following the emergence of social engineering.
To close the first day of conference, a special edition of the Carrefour des Possibles (“At the Intersection of Opportunities” seminar) will highlight some of the technological, economic, and industrial aspects of the day’s discussions.
With the proliferation and perfection of the Internet and the Web over the last 30 years, and more recently, with the development of what we call “social networks” and the Web 2.0, digital technologies have come to restructure our everyday as well as deeply transform the relationship between individuals, groups, generations, and nations. A notable consequence is the emergence of relational technologies, what Jeremy Rifkin calls “R-technologies.” These technologies revolutionize the traditional rules of the economy and industry and fundamentally challenge the psychological individuation processes as described by the philosopher Gilbert Simondon, who affirms that individual psychological tools can only emerge by participating in the creation of social ones.

The spectacular growth of social networks affects every sectors and alters the rules of the socio-economic game, notably through younger generations. Thus, we can and we should carefully evaluate the consequences of how we orient our future industrial development – even if it is defined in terms of economic choices, policies, investments, regulations, R&D, design, management, marketing or distribution – because ultimately, these will all be greatly conditioned by choices and processes coming from social engineering.
Social engineering enables the production of social networks. These networks, at first glance, can be perceived to be non-social or even anti-social. They are indeed quite disconnected from the long-held understanding of what is social as intrinsically tied to territory, language, to a religious, political, or cultural heritage, passed down from generation to generation, and where what is social is considered common ground and history. In this New Industrial World Forum, we explore the hypothesis that a major challenge of this new industrial world is to ensure the necessary technological, economic, and social conditions to update the potential of creation obtained from new networks of social relationships carried by social networks. This will lead us to reconsider first, the constitution and development of the Web 3.0’s social networks (the Web 3.0 groups the Web’s semantic and social attributes), and second, the desired economic and ethical conditions for the management of these new settings, which are administration, control, transparency, and e-Democracy.
Design, in the broadest sense, including R&D and the social initiative generated from ascending innovation, increasingly depends on strategies that incorporate top-down expert approach with bottom-up social indexing. The New Industrial World Forum 2008 hopes to clarify how these developments are coming to life in research and industry due to a fundamental renewal of design and methodology of development, the new role of designers, and the defining shift towards what can be called “distributed design”, highlighted by the principal innovation actors who are also and foremost, embedded in real social networks , the key members of these networks.

26-11-2009: The return of material

The last decades have been dominated by the development of, what we have called, the “virtual”, opposed to the “real”, and that we have assimilated to “immaterial”. However, there is no form without material, and, information is a state of material. With the Internet of things, it’s the material which get back in the middle of information’s systems. Information without material support doesn’t exist and reciprocally, which means that virtual is not opposed to real; virtual allows its possibility of incarnation and the depth of its incarnation. An Indian Nambikwara casts in the Amazonian forest, an abounding virtuality by which, this hostile surrounding, is for him, habitable, but also familiar and constitutes his daily reality. A build-up space is a network of streets, that is to say of urban objects named, and by this, “labelled” and “virtualized”. The internet of communicating things consists in an electronic and generalized labelling of industrial objects which intensifies the virtualization of the real, which means that it constitutes a new relational space –as virtual is what actualizes relationships- where objects, included in system, transform relationships between subjects, at the risk of short-circuiting them.

  • Introduction, Alain Seban, Centre Pompidou Chairman
  • Reticulated objects and hyper-objectivity, B. Stiegler (IRI)
  • New industrial world and new territories for design, A. Cadix (ENSCI)
  • From the mobile internet to the internet of things : economic, technological and political stakes, B. Benhamou
  • The mediatization of daily objects, H. Verdier (Cap Digital)

26-11-2009: The new industrial object

This new industrial world produces a new industrial object –which follows on an other way, what Simondon has called the “concretization process”: this neo-object, as Jean-Louis Fréchin named it, records events, produces others, organizes itself with other objects animated by subjects and thus produces itself “actions” through “actuators”. This communicating object “Internetized” is active and visible because of its materiality, while it can carries informational, virtual, new qualities, and which can keep hidden, escaping to the object owner, and animating out of his knowledge. The new industrial object, which “animates”, which “tells stories”, as an enchantment object, is also a redoubtable factor of disenchantment, whose Max Weber and Marcel Gauchet would have given the historic meaning: the new system of objects, accentuating the real effects of traceability, seems being able to dissolve every intimacy, every secret, every singularity. That is to say, the Internet of things also constitutes the junction of possibilities and alternatives, which will make the new industrial world.

  • Design the neo-object, JL Fréchin (No Design)
  • Users of the new digital objects, Nicola Nova
  • The metamorphosis of the objects, F. Kaplan (EPFL)
  • Strategy, view of the Internet of objects, JL Beylat (Alcatel Lucent)

26-11-2009: New standards, new software and new infrastructures for neo-objects

There is no Internet of things without sensors; there are no sensors without compatibility and communication standards, etc. The history of traceability, which begins with bar codes in the 80’s, thus initiates a long story which will continue with the nanostructuration of materials. The memory of new objects, of our computers for example, is transfered to datacenters, which stock it and manage it, following models of cloud computing. Standardization brings the problem of knowing if the rematerialization can reintroduce the industry model of property equipment, or if it’s, to the contrary, the Internet model which is meant to redefine all the industrial technology. The stake is more than ever, the new industrial world, which will modify the Internet model itself: 
- by submitting it to logics of a centralized control, occult and always more powerful 
- by accentuating its decentralized and highly contributory character. Here come the decisive question of standards definition, of regulation and of data management’s transparency.

  • Traceability : History and perspectives, Xavier Barras (GS1)
  • The cloud computing and the internet of things, Ch. Fauré (Cap Gemini)
  • Open data, portable data, what do we share on the Web ? , Valérie Peugeot (Sofrecom)

26-11-2009: Carrefour des possibles by FING

27-11-09: Open innovation and unfinished object

May the neo-objects system become a huge open source Mecano ? We now speak of object’s hacking (as well as biosynthesis, or else of nano-objects), “do it yourself” becoming the watchword of every fields in what is presented as a general contribution economy- where the usage value seems to be back, or give way to a practical value not solvable in the exchange value: the value of the object will built itself in what will be not only its customisation but also its execution within communities of practitioners sharing these objects’ executions as well as the objects’ score, or virtual spimes. 
The neo-object, which is no more the starting point leading to the development of different services around it, is on the contrary the final point prepared by a new kind of equipment industries (that is to say of interpretation tools) whose 3D printer is the precursor, allowing the achievement in a contributory space, of executions which call into question the very notion of service: this hyper-object is also a relational object where the function of production becomes essentially a function of post-production, and where the bottom-up innovation become an open innovation.

  • From the fabless to the fablabs, the Internet model of innovation applied to the industrial objects, Daniel Kaplan, FING
  • Hackers and makers, Massimo Banzi (projet Arduino)
  • When connecting things becomes possible: 7 corners of an evolved networked Episteme, Julian Bleecker (Techkwondo)
  • Public objects: connected things and civic responsibilities in the networked city (Adam Greenfield, author of The revolution of ubimedia

27-11-2009: The new objects’ organization

A tactile organology appeared with communicating objects whose the iPhone is the main representative, and on which goes on an haptic organology that draw not only the finger but also the hands and the whole body, and in first place the touch, as well as an organology of the body, of the familial cell and more generally of the household spaces using under-systems of objects through which industrial sectors of household goods are laid out, as well as network’s operator: here is formed a new system of objects in the same way Jean Baudrillard spoke about them in 1968. Shoes and iPods, but also furniture, book and computer, and of course “fablabs”. Is an emancipating object becoming domesticable ? Is a new based environment of psychic and collective individuation, in the making?

  • From the transit to the reliance : the new paradigm of the urban mobility, Georges AMAR (RATP)
  • Phenomenology of the body and of the reticulated private space , François David Sebbah
  • The brands face to the neo-objects, Benoit Heilbrunn

27-11-09: Industrialisation of the transitional object and reconfiguration of the private time and space in the networks inter-objectivity

“To code the knowledge on person”, as Xavier Guchet says it both in the style of Foucauld, and is it possible to code it for themselves, that is to say in a critical reflexivity of their own practices, and of their own productions of objects or organisations between objects, and through these objects, between subjects, as well as in a critic of “scores” (spimes) which are their virtual capsules, or behind their backs, rendering them such as hyper-consumers contributing blindly and with passion to an extraordinary sophisticated form of voluntary submissiveness. Because, if the traceability becomes permanent, out of deliberated connexion time, objects being themselves always connected and local networks that they formed assuring to the worldwide network their objectal reporting, otherwise objective, two questions will be here examined in order to instruct the terms of such an alternative (which lead, as always, to a compromise): 
the study of an history of the public/private couple formation, comprehended from an anthropologic point of view, that is to say outside of the occidental definition of this relationship and the study of the hypothetical possibility of its disappearance 
the study of what could be intimacy nowadays, and its place in this network of related objects, at the moment when we ask ourselves about what Roland Gori calls, the extimacy.

  • The consumer got down to work , Marie-Anne Dujarier
  • The extimacy, Alain Abelhauer
  • Anthropology of intimacy , Jean-Paul Demoule

Le nouveau système des objets

The emergence of sensors and actuators’ technologies, which sustain the development of the “internet of things” and traceability technologies, which are already an integral part of the Internet economic model, reconfigurates the organization of virtual and real, while rematerializing information. It’s a new “system of objects” which is thus formatted. 
Every human object is technical and every technical object is enrolled in a technical system, as Jean Baudrillard explained in Le système des objets, quoting Gilbert Simondon. The industrial object, systematically becomes communicating, that is to say issuer and receiver of informations –often without its owner knowledge- together build a new system of objects, which will surely dominate the industrial organization of the XXI° century and will transform public daily spaces as well as private, in their deeper layers as well as in their surfaces.

This 2010 edition of the Forum will focus on the question surrounding the body at a time when the extreme miniaturization of technologies constitute a new prosthetic organology. The challenges around the development of micro and nano-technologies meet many research, scientific and artistic works. They make us anticipate the development of new objects and new industrial services in a close relationship with designers.seminar
The issue of sensorial-motricity, and the coherence of these tools and prostheses with our field of perception and action, especially in the cultural domain will be among our priorities and will give way during the year to a seminar at IRI and and to a preparatory seminar with ENSCI and Cap Digital.

2010 edition on Lignes de temps.

Preparatory seminar at ENSCI : May 4-5, 2010.
Forum : December 2010 at Centre Pompidou.

NEW INDUSTRIAL WORLD FORUM 2011 – TECHNOLOGY AND TRUST
December 19th & 20th
Centre Pompidou, Grande salle

A society, whatever its form, is above all a fidelity production system. To believe in someone – and not only to trust him means counting on this person beyond any calculation as a warranty for unconditionality. This also means as a guaranty for certain principles, rightness, integrity, etc. These are the roles of my father, priest, teacher, farmer or officer. These figures represent a kind of super-ego. Thus, people who believe in such figures also invest in them – and in the concept of Nation, in Christ or the idea of Revolution and even more so in the social project they symbolize. A project that each and every businessman should embody (according to Max Weber’s thought).

Since Weber, we know that capitalism turned the type of fidelity that structured the western society (formerly based on the faith particular to religious belief) into a kind of trust seen as computable and with money value. However, the crisis of capitalism that broke out in 2007-2008 taught us that this transformation of fidelity into computability accomplished by the monetary systems reached the limit whereby credit has been largely discredited. This process, that comes close to a rationalisation (in Weber’s as well as Adorno’s words) and leads to a disillusion, is essentially linked to an engramming process. This process has gained a new dimension during the Renaissance thanks to the printing press and has been subject of unprecedented politico-religious conflicts during the Reformation. Throughout these fights, the “pharmacology of the mind” formed by the Book and the books, and the therapy required for such “pharmaka” (poison and medicine at the same time) became the themes of a spiritual conflict leading to a new religious and secular therapy.

No one can ignore that with the development of IT (which is the latest step in the engramming process) the burning issues raised by the invention of the printing press that triggered on a large scale the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation are recurring. Indeed, trust has become a primary matter in the world of metadataware, social networks and traceability (not to mention questions about secure payment that is the most shallow issue of the matter). After tackling the issue of trust in nanotechnology in the 2010 Forum, the aim of 2011’s instalment is to assess the range of this issue as far as the economic, organisational, industrial, technological and social models are capable of rebuilding trust.

December 19th – 10h-13h
FIRST SESSION – HISTORY AND ANTHROPOLOGY OF TRUST
Trust, faith, fidelity, History of the Gift and emergence of the fiduciary/currency system
Focusing back on the history of trust, seen as in conjunction with the development of the engramming process and track inscription devices, since the crisis brought about by the printing press until today’s development of the digital sector.

December 19th – 14h30-19h
SESSION 2 – SCIENCE, TRUST, CALCULATION AND KNOWLEDGE
Risk, insurance, technology of trust, society of risk, current affairs in the nuclear sector
Valuation, science, the relations between mistrust and science
Is trust computable? Is it just quantified valuation of the risks (financial, sanitary, nuclear, technological, etc.) or does it, on the contrary, come from totally different principles, in which case the question of valuation and democracy has to be reconsidered from scratch?

SESSIONS 3 – ECONOMY and MARKETING
Trust in the relationship. The industrialisation of the relationship: the loyalty programmes are increasingly less working (dependence instead of trust, locking). The creators of trust spaces.
Beyond the mere calculation of the risks, an engineering of trust and new spaces trying to recreate it has developed, especially on the Web. Which difficulties do they aim to overcome? Which solutions do they propose and how to consider the underlying demand they express?

December 20th – 9h30 – 13h
SESSION 4 – TECHNOLOGY AND DESIGN OF TRUST
MARKETING, TRUST AND MISTRUST
Does the fabrication of trust lead to mistrust (ex: loyalty cards) – Necessity of the super-ego, the symbolic references. The brands, the brand tribalism. The personal data. The profiling. The contribution system, reconstruction of symbolic matters in economic matters. Trust-encouraging designs (Bolnick, cognitive sciences).

December 20th – 9h30 – 13h
SESSION 5 – TRUST AND POLITICS
Speak again about the public-private relationship, Wikileaks, Public data, the “Care” system.
Public data, magic bullet or corruption of the public by private interests? With some exception on sensible data – Transparency: explain why there is no on some points.
Are Public data a magic bullet for States willing to rebuild trust or, on the contrary, a tilting of public sector towards private interests? What about the exceptions for sensible data – May transparency be actually explaining why there is no transparency on some subjets?

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