Lift Conference
Encyclopedia
Lift is a series of events designed to inspire and connect individuals exploring the social impact of new technologies. Each Lift conference is a three-day event consisting of talks, workshops, interactive art, and discussions on understanding and anticipating the most important social changes, as well as meeting the people behind them.
Lift has been called by BBC News "one of the highlights of the technophile calendar", "an opportunity to meet up with some of the most interesting people around and engage in debate about the future with those who are actually building it, instead of waiting for it to happen".
Lift has held eleven events; six in Geneva
(Switzerland
), one in Seoul
(South Korea
), two in Jeju Island (South Korea), and two in Marseille
(France
).
Lift was founded by Laurent Haug and three co-founders (Nicolas Nova, Steven Ritchey, John Staehli), and is organized by an international team, with the support of organizations, such as, the European Commission, International Electrotechnical Commission, Microsoft
, and Mozilla
.
, Robert Scoble
, Bruce Sterling
, Euan Semple or Hugh MacLeod.
Lift 07 was held on February 7–9, 2007 in Geneva, Switzerland, both at the University of Geneva
and the International Conference Centre Geneva. LIFT 07 incorporated extra elements normally found in unconference
s—peer-to-peer
workshops and conference participant presentations. Lift07 Open Stage was a test to see how un-conference models can be incorporated into traditional conferences.
The event was attended by 550 persons, among them speakers like Florence Devouard
, Brian Cox
, Sugata Mitra, Jan Chipchase
, Stowe Boyd, Paul Barnett
, or Régine Debatty and featured more than 50 presentations and workshops.
Lift Asia 07 was held on September 12, 2007 at the Yurim Art Hall in Seoul, South Korea. The event was about spaces, how technological developments in both the physical worlds and virtual environments are reshaping buildings, games, and soon web browsers. Four speakers participated in the event, Adam Greenfield
, Bruce Sterling
, XL games CEO Jake Song and Korean architect Yoo Suk Yeon.
The event was attended by 180 persons.
Lift 08 was held on February 6–8, 2008 in Geneva, Switzerland. The topic of the conference was "Challenges and opportunities of technology in society". The conference was a sell out, hitting its target of attracting 700 participants. There were 45 speakers, including Kevin Warwick
and Pierre Bellanger
.
Lift Asia 08, Lift's second Asian event, was held on September 4–6, 2008 in Jeju Island, Korea. The program featured a mix of international and Asian speakers like Joonmo Kwon (CEO of 300-million-user game company Nexon), Takeshi Natsuno (inventor of the imode for NTT Docomo), Bruno Bonnel (Founder of Infogrammes), Dan Dubno and Eric Rodenbeck (Stamen Design).
Lift 09 was held on February 25–27, 2009 in Geneva, Switzerland and looked back to look ahead, exploring topics like change, solidarity, love, or design, during three days of intense networking and inspiration themed around a simple question: "Where did the future go? We were told the future would be about mechanization, computerization, 1984-like nightmares or robots. What did and did not happen? What can we learn from the predictions that never materialized to better look at the future?" The conference was attended by 800 participants.
Speakers included: Vint Cerf
, Roh Soh Yeong (Art Center Nabi, Korea), Ramesh Srinivasan (UCLA), Patrick J. Gyger (Maison d'Ailleurs), Oriol Pascual (ENVIU), Nicolas Nova (Lift), Melanie Rieback, Matt Webb, Juliana Rotich (GlobalVoices/Ushahidi
, Kenya), Jörg Jelden (Trendbüro, Germany), Natalie Jeremijenko (UCSD, USA), James Gillies (CERN, Switzerland), James Auger (Auger-Loizeau/Royal College of Art, UK), Frank Beau, Fabio Sergio (frog design, Italy), David Rose
(Vitality, USA), Clive Van Heerden (Philips Design, Netherlands), Dan Hill (Arup, Australia), Carlo Ratti (MIT, USA), Baba Wamé (Yaoundé 2 University, Cameroon), Florence Devouard
(Wikimedia France and Wikimedia Foundation, France), Anne Galloway (Concordia University, Design & Computation Arts, Canada), Anab Jain (Nokia Design / Superflux, UK).
Lift France 09 was in Marseilles, June 18–19, 2009. The theme was "hands-on future", a future of do-it-yourself where citizens will be able to customize, hack and transform the objects around them.
Speakers included France Digital Economy and prospective minister Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet
, entrepreneur and writer Gunter Pauli
, and Dorkbot
's founder Douglas Repetto.
Lift Asia 09 was held on September 1–3, 2009 in Jeju Korea. The event's theme was "Serious Fun".
"The Internet started as platform for academics, then it became a huge business platform. Now it is an entertainment playground for users. People spend time having fun on the Social Web, access virtual worlds on their cell phones or interact with robots and networked objects. But we believe these services and platforms go far beyond mere leisure: their usage may reveal new social practices that will spread in other contexts (business, education), and the services first targeted at entertainment can lead to original innovations. This year's Lift Asia will focus on the lessons we can draw for fields such as general innovation, sociology, management, business, design and education."
Lift 10 happened in Geneva on May 5–7, 2010. The theme was "Connected people", featuring an improved format, with focus on audience and speakers' interaction.
Lift10 will explore the most overlooked aspect of innovation: people. Known in techno-parlance as users, consumers, clients, participants, prosumers, citizens, or activists, people ultimately define the success of all technological and entrepreneurial projects. They adopt or refute, promote or demote, embrace, reject, or re-purpose. Their approaches are unique, influenced by cultural and generational diversity. A decade after the rebirth of user-centered design
and innovation, it is time to explore the myths and uncover the reality behind the "connected people".
The conference covered Generations and technologies, the Redefinition of Privacy, Online Communities, Politics, and Media. Speakers included Alice Taylor
, Aubrey de Grey
, Jamais Cascio
, and Rahaf Harfoush.
Lift France 2010 happened in Marseille, July 5–7, 2010. The conference attracted 560 participants to explore the theme "dot-Real - Webify the real world!" : how the technologies and concepts of the web are changing the real world today and in the future.
For the last 20 years, networked technologies have redistributed the power of imagining, evaluating, and acting. With Asia’s shift from being the world’s factory to a major source of innovation and in a world where today’s consumers have also become producers, new boundaries arise and with them a new society. The Web changes the world – But to what extent? With what limitations? How can it reach its full potential?
Smaller events also happened all around the world. Part of the "Lift@home" program these community organized gathering happened in places like Barcelona, London, Toronto or Brussels.
Lift11, 2–4 February 2011, International Conference Center, Geneva, Switzerland.
The program will feature sessions on:
Robolift11, 23–25 March 2011, Lyon, France.
Lift has been called by BBC News "one of the highlights of the technophile calendar", "an opportunity to meet up with some of the most interesting people around and engage in debate about the future with those who are actually building it, instead of waiting for it to happen".
Lift has held eleven events; six in Geneva
Geneva
Geneva In the national languages of Switzerland the city is known as Genf , Ginevra and Genevra is the second-most-populous city in Switzerland and is the most populous city of Romandie, the French-speaking part of Switzerland...
(Switzerland
Switzerland
Switzerland name of one of the Swiss cantons. ; ; ; or ), in its full name the Swiss Confederation , is a federal republic consisting of 26 cantons, with Bern as the seat of the federal authorities. The country is situated in Western Europe,Or Central Europe depending on the definition....
), one in Seoul
Seoul
Seoul , officially the Seoul Special City, is the capital and largest metropolis of South Korea. A megacity with a population of over 10 million, it is the largest city proper in the OECD developed world...
(South Korea
South Korea
The Republic of Korea , , is a sovereign state in East Asia, located on the southern portion of the Korean Peninsula. It is neighbored by the People's Republic of China to the west, Japan to the east, North Korea to the north, and the East China Sea and Republic of China to the south...
), two in Jeju Island (South Korea), and two in Marseille
Marseille
Marseille , known in antiquity as Massalia , is the second largest city in France, after Paris, with a population of 852,395 within its administrative limits on a land area of . The urban area of Marseille extends beyond the city limits with a population of over 1,420,000 on an area of...
(France
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
).
Lift was founded by Laurent Haug and three co-founders (Nicolas Nova, Steven Ritchey, John Staehli), and is organized by an international team, with the support of organizations, such as, the European Commission, International Electrotechnical Commission, Microsoft
Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...
, and Mozilla
Mozilla
Mozilla is a term used in a number of ways in relation to the Mozilla.org project and the Mozilla Foundation, their defunct commercial predecessor Netscape Communications Corporation, and their related application software....
.
2006
Lift 06 was held on Feb 2–3, 2006 in Geneva, Switzerland, at the CICG. The conference welcomed 350 persons, among them speakers like Cory DoctorowCory Doctorow
Cory Efram Doctorow is a Canadian-British blogger, journalist, and science fiction author who serves as co-editor of the blog Boing Boing. He is an activist in favour of liberalising copyright laws and a proponent of the Creative Commons organization, using some of their licences for his books...
, Robert Scoble
Robert Scoble
Robert Scoble is an American blogger, technical evangelist, and author. Scoble is best known for his blog, Scobleizer, which came to prominence during his tenure as a technology evangelist at Microsoft. He is married to Maryam Ghaemmaghami Scoble. He has three children; one from a previous...
, Bruce Sterling
Bruce Sterling
Michael Bruce Sterling is an American science fiction author, best known for his novels and his work on the Mirrorshades anthology, which helped define the cyberpunk genre.-Writings:...
, Euan Semple or Hugh MacLeod.
2007
Lift held two conferences in 2007.Lift 07 was held on February 7–9, 2007 in Geneva, Switzerland, both at the University of Geneva
University of Geneva
The University of Geneva is a public research university located in Geneva, Switzerland.It was founded in 1559 by John Calvin, as a theological seminary and law school. It remained focused on theology until the 17th century, when it became a center for Enlightenment scholarship. In 1873, it...
and the International Conference Centre Geneva. LIFT 07 incorporated extra elements normally found in unconference
Unconference
An unconference is a participant-driven meeting. The term "unconference" has been applied, or self-applied, to a wide range of gatherings that try to avoid one or more aspects of a conventional conference, such as high fees, sponsored presentations, and top-down organization...
s—peer-to-peer
Peer-to-peer
Peer-to-peer computing or networking is a distributed application architecture that partitions tasks or workloads among peers. Peers are equally privileged, equipotent participants in the application...
workshops and conference participant presentations. Lift07 Open Stage was a test to see how un-conference models can be incorporated into traditional conferences.
The event was attended by 550 persons, among them speakers like Florence Devouard
Florence Devouard
Florence Jacqueline Sylvie Devouard, née Nibart was the Chair of the Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation between October 2006 and July 2008, succeeding Jimmy Wales....
, Brian Cox
Brian Cox (physicist)
Brian Edward Cox, OBE , is a British particle physicist, a Royal Society University Research Fellow and a professor at the University of Manchester. He is a member of the High Energy Physics group at the University of Manchester, and works on the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider at...
, Sugata Mitra, Jan Chipchase
Jan Chipchase
Jan Chipchase is a user experience researcher who works for Frog Design.He was formerly chief usability researcher at Nokia. The goal of his research was to understand the ways technology works in different cultures, with a focus on understanding technology 3 to 15 years from now...
, Stowe Boyd, Paul Barnett
Paul Barnett (video game designer)
Paul Barnett is an English game designer who is currently the Senior Creative Director for BioWare-Mythic. Barnett is best known for Games Workshop's Warhammer Fantasy Battle universe, although he has also been involved in the development of numerous other games.At the age of 24, Barnett started...
, or Régine Debatty and featured more than 50 presentations and workshops.
Lift Asia 07 was held on September 12, 2007 at the Yurim Art Hall in Seoul, South Korea. The event was about spaces, how technological developments in both the physical worlds and virtual environments are reshaping buildings, games, and soon web browsers. Four speakers participated in the event, Adam Greenfield
Adam Greenfield
Adam Greenfield is an American writer and designer, and is the founder and managing director of urban-systems design practice Urbanscale, based in New York. From 2008 to 2010 he was Nokia's head of design direction for user interface and services...
, Bruce Sterling
Bruce Sterling
Michael Bruce Sterling is an American science fiction author, best known for his novels and his work on the Mirrorshades anthology, which helped define the cyberpunk genre.-Writings:...
, XL games CEO Jake Song and Korean architect Yoo Suk Yeon.
The event was attended by 180 persons.
2008
Lift held two conferences in 2008.Lift 08 was held on February 6–8, 2008 in Geneva, Switzerland. The topic of the conference was "Challenges and opportunities of technology in society". The conference was a sell out, hitting its target of attracting 700 participants. There were 45 speakers, including Kevin Warwick
Kevin Warwick
Kevin Warwick is a British scientist and professor of cybernetics at the University of Reading, Reading, Berkshire, United Kingdom...
and Pierre Bellanger
Pierre Bellanger
Pierre Bellanger is founder and CEO of Skyrock, the world’s leading French-language social network. Bellanger created Skyrock in 1985 as a national FM station in France...
.
Lift Asia 08, Lift's second Asian event, was held on September 4–6, 2008 in Jeju Island, Korea. The program featured a mix of international and Asian speakers like Joonmo Kwon (CEO of 300-million-user game company Nexon), Takeshi Natsuno (inventor of the imode for NTT Docomo), Bruno Bonnel (Founder of Infogrammes), Dan Dubno and Eric Rodenbeck (Stamen Design).
2009
Lift held three conferences in 2009.Lift 09 was held on February 25–27, 2009 in Geneva, Switzerland and looked back to look ahead, exploring topics like change, solidarity, love, or design, during three days of intense networking and inspiration themed around a simple question: "Where did the future go? We were told the future would be about mechanization, computerization, 1984-like nightmares or robots. What did and did not happen? What can we learn from the predictions that never materialized to better look at the future?" The conference was attended by 800 participants.
Speakers included: Vint Cerf
Vint Cerf
Vinton Gray "Vint" Cerf is an American computer scientist, who is recognized as one of "the fathers of the Internet", sharing this title with American computer scientist Bob Kahn...
, Roh Soh Yeong (Art Center Nabi, Korea), Ramesh Srinivasan (UCLA), Patrick J. Gyger (Maison d'Ailleurs), Oriol Pascual (ENVIU), Nicolas Nova (Lift), Melanie Rieback, Matt Webb, Juliana Rotich (GlobalVoices/Ushahidi
Ushahidi
Ushahidi, Inc. is a non-profit software company that develops free and open source software for information collection, visualization and interactive mapping....
, Kenya), Jörg Jelden (Trendbüro, Germany), Natalie Jeremijenko (UCSD, USA), James Gillies (CERN, Switzerland), James Auger (Auger-Loizeau/Royal College of Art, UK), Frank Beau, Fabio Sergio (frog design, Italy), David Rose
David Rose
David Rose was a British-born American songwriter, composer, arranger, pianist, and orchestra leader. His most famous compositions were "The Stripper", "Holiday for Strings", and "Calypso Melody"...
(Vitality, USA), Clive Van Heerden (Philips Design, Netherlands), Dan Hill (Arup, Australia), Carlo Ratti (MIT, USA), Baba Wamé (Yaoundé 2 University, Cameroon), Florence Devouard
Florence Devouard
Florence Jacqueline Sylvie Devouard, née Nibart was the Chair of the Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation between October 2006 and July 2008, succeeding Jimmy Wales....
(Wikimedia France and Wikimedia Foundation, France), Anne Galloway (Concordia University, Design & Computation Arts, Canada), Anab Jain (Nokia Design / Superflux, UK).
Lift France 09 was in Marseilles, June 18–19, 2009. The theme was "hands-on future", a future of do-it-yourself where citizens will be able to customize, hack and transform the objects around them.
Speakers included France Digital Economy and prospective minister Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet
Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet
Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet , often referred to by her initials NKM, is the current Minister for Ecology, Sustainable Development, Transport and Housing of France, appointed in November 2010....
, entrepreneur and writer Gunter Pauli
Gunter Pauli
Gunter Pauli is a serial entrepreneur and initiator of The Blue Economy.- Life and Business :Gunter Pauli was born in 1956...
, and Dorkbot
Dorkbot
Dorkbot is a group of affiliated organizations worldwide that sponsor grassroots meetings of artists, engineers, designers, scientists, inventors, and anyone else working under the very broad umbrella of electronic art...
's founder Douglas Repetto.
Lift Asia 09 was held on September 1–3, 2009 in Jeju Korea. The event's theme was "Serious Fun".
"The Internet started as platform for academics, then it became a huge business platform. Now it is an entertainment playground for users. People spend time having fun on the Social Web, access virtual worlds on their cell phones or interact with robots and networked objects. But we believe these services and platforms go far beyond mere leisure: their usage may reveal new social practices that will spread in other contexts (business, education), and the services first targeted at entertainment can lead to original innovations. This year's Lift Asia will focus on the lessons we can draw for fields such as general innovation, sociology, management, business, design and education."
2010
Lift held two major conferences in 2010.Lift 10 happened in Geneva on May 5–7, 2010. The theme was "Connected people", featuring an improved format, with focus on audience and speakers' interaction.
Lift10 will explore the most overlooked aspect of innovation: people. Known in techno-parlance as users, consumers, clients, participants, prosumers, citizens, or activists, people ultimately define the success of all technological and entrepreneurial projects. They adopt or refute, promote or demote, embrace, reject, or re-purpose. Their approaches are unique, influenced by cultural and generational diversity. A decade after the rebirth of user-centered design
User-centered design
In broad terms, user-centered design or pervasive usability is a design philosophy and a process in which the needs, wants, and limitations of end users of a product are given extensive attention at each stage of the design process...
and innovation, it is time to explore the myths and uncover the reality behind the "connected people".
The conference covered Generations and technologies, the Redefinition of Privacy, Online Communities, Politics, and Media. Speakers included Alice Taylor
Alice Taylor
Alice Taylor is founder of Makieworld, an "'entertainment playspace for young people' that will invite users to download and print 3D dolls and accessories."...
, Aubrey de Grey
Aubrey de Grey
Aubrey David Nicholas Jasper de Grey is an English author and theoretician in the field of gerontology, and the Chief Science Officer of the SENS Foundation. He is editor-in-chief of the academic journal Rejuvenation Research, author of The Mitochondrial Free Radical Theory of Aging and co-author...
, Jamais Cascio
Jamais Cascio
Jamais Cascio is a San Francisco Bay Area-based writer and ethical futurist specializing in design strategies and possible outcomes for future scenarios...
, and Rahaf Harfoush.
Lift France 2010 happened in Marseille, July 5–7, 2010. The conference attracted 560 participants to explore the theme "dot-Real - Webify the real world!" : how the technologies and concepts of the web are changing the real world today and in the future.
For the last 20 years, networked technologies have redistributed the power of imagining, evaluating, and acting. With Asia’s shift from being the world’s factory to a major source of innovation and in a world where today’s consumers have also become producers, new boundaries arise and with them a new society. The Web changes the world – But to what extent? With what limitations? How can it reach its full potential?
Smaller events also happened all around the world. Part of the "Lift@home" program these community organized gathering happened in places like Barcelona, London, Toronto or Brussels.
2011
Two events have been announced in 2011.Lift11, 2–4 February 2011, International Conference Center, Geneva, Switzerland.
The program will feature sessions on:
- Re-organization, the changing workplace, new forms of work, organizations, collaboration, etc
- Engaging users with games
- Building and managing communities
- Community mining, new forms of business intelligence
- Trends and ideas from around the world
- New frontiers
Robolift11, 23–25 March 2011, Lyon, France.
External links
- Lift. Official website.
- Lift Videos. Talks in video.