An overview of the French digital ecosystem

A four hour slot was dedicated to the working group’s session. First part featured invited speakers from the French local ecosystem, from 10:00 to 12:30 am.air castle slides

Benoît Drouillat, president of Designers Interactifs, the main professional organisation for interaction design in France, introduced the current state of the art in France : trends within the profession, the level of recognition by institutional partners, design education players and main figures. He outlined the multiplicity of terms and definitions and the effective lack of recognition of interaction design as a proper field of design practice, despite a quite healthy and active mix of well trained professional designers, innovative companies and studios, and valuable design courses. But as we’re in France, everything should be more complicated… Read the content of the presentation on Designers Interactifs website.

Virginia Cruz and Nicolas Gaudron from the design consultancy fim IDSL made a concise but complete overview of the process of innovation they engage with their clients (with a perfect fluent english, thanks Virginia). They drew the line quite efficiently between problem solving for applied innovative solutions to a broader social approach. Unfortunately we are not able to present their works for non disclosure matters, but there is a comprehensive portfolio of their projects on the IDSL website.

Some feedback from the Cumulus members : an “open mic” session

The second part in the afternoon was stuck with four presentations from various Cumulus members, with very little time for discussion unfortunately.inflatable roller ball

Dominique Sciamma, head of Strate Collège Designers, introduced the “Interactive Systems & Objects” programme.

Martin Zimper, head of the CAST programme at Zürich (Switzerland) ZHDK, made a nice introduction to this new department dedicated to new audiovisual formats & experiments for online and mobile media.

Niels Hendriks, a young researcher from KHLim Media and Design Academy in Genk (Belgium), shared with us the questions raised by the “Social Spaces” research group.

Finally, last but not least, Ulrich Schendzielorz from Schwäbisch Gmünd HfG (Germany) made a very efficient presentation of the Interaction Design BFA program in SG.

Next Cumulus Digital Culture is planned during the Cumulus fall conference in Denver, September 29th 2011. Fred Murell from RMCAD will introduce us to the fascinating IxD community in Colorado. Programme will be announced on this blog as soon as possible. Participation is open to Cumulus members, please send me a mail !

Frédéric Degouzon
Head of Strategy, L’École de design Nantes Atlantique
f.degouzon@lecolededesign.com
Follow @fdegouzon

The provisional program is now online for the next session in Paris. It will be divided in two parts : morning part will be dedicated to invited speakers while the afternoon session will be open to Cumulus members introducing themselves.

10:00 – 12:30 Part #1 Invited speakers : a glance at French interaction design

First speaker : Benoît Drouillat, President of “Designers Interactifs” – Main professional organisation for interaction design in France

Benoît Drouillat is the founding president of *designers interactifs*, an organization to advance the interaction design profession in France. He has an hybrid background in both design and literaturecheap bounce houses. He has held numerous positions in interactive agencies. He talks and teaches in design schools and at universities (Paris-Est Créteil and Limoges) about interface design and information architecture. He has published 2 books with Nicole Pignier: Penser le webdesign (2004) and Le Webdesign, sociale expérience des interfaces web (2008).

www.designersinteractifs.org
www.drouillat.com

Second speakers : “Our experience as a small French innovation design consultancy” – Nicolas Gaudron & Virginia Cruz, IDSL

Nicolas Gaudron holds a Master of Arts in Design Products from the Royal College of Art in London.
After a work experience at IDEO Palo Alto (California), he worked at INRIA (French National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control) as product / interaction designer on a new communication control protocol and smart devices («Interliving» European research project of the Disappearing Computer IST programme). He then joined Renault Industrial Design, «Prospective & Concept Car» Department where he has contributed to the development of the Human-Machine Interaction expertise, before founding IDSL in April 2007.

Virginia Cruz has an engineering and design background. She is graduated from Ecole Polytechnique, Ecole des Mines ParisTech, and from the Royal College of Art in London with a Master of Arts in Industrial Design inflatable triangular castle maze. After working for Electrolux in Sweden, Sony R&D in France, she worked for Orange France Telecom group as interaction designer at the «Smart Objects and New Interfaces Laboratory» in Grenoble and at the Explocentre innovation centre in Paris. She joined IDSL in April 2008.

Teaching activities They talk and teach in design, engineering and business schools about innovation methodology, design thinking and interaction and service design. They started teaching in 2006 when they cofounded a 1-year interaction design studio at ENSAD (Ecole Nationale Superieure des Arts Decoratifs) in Paris. They are supervisors and teachers of the interaction design course (part of the Humanities and Social Sciences programme) at Ecole Polytechnique since 2008.
www.id-sl.com

12:30 – 13:30 Lunch break

Self service buffet.

13:30 – 15:00 Part#2 Members sessions : an introduction to Cumulus members’ activities and projects

Rule : Fifteen minutes session to introduce your approach, your experiments or your outputs in the field of Digital Culture

• 13:30 – Dominique Sciamma, Strate Collège Designers
• 13:50 – Martin Zimper, ZHGK/CAST (Zürich)
• 14:10 – Niels Hendrik, KHLim/MDA, Social Spaces (Genk)
• 14:30 – Ulrich Schendzielorz Schwäbisch Gmünd HfG

You feel like you should be on stage ? Send us a mail f.degouzon@lecolededesign.com

Updates will be published here as soon as possible.

15:00 End of the Working Group

The session will be held at Strate Collège Designers. 50  seats available. Official website for the conference (registration required to participate).