Athens, November 2015. The night was warm, as in Paris a week earlier, and orange lights illuminated the Acropolis overlooking the city. Near Syntagma Square and the Parliament where the changing of the guard attracts tourists, lies an avenue with […]

Clamart, june 2015. Nothing seems to be easier than to go swimming. You just have to jump into the water. Whether you are a good swimmer or not, whether you are dressed or not, it is that simple! Yet, the […]

Paris, November 2014. Thousands of books handily accessible. It was one of the strong arguments of the ebooks readers retailers. Ease of transport, abundance. When I saw your bag for the first time and I realized that it contained books, […]

Quebec, August 2015. An historic site with its splendid terrace, its cannons and its view over the majestic river can only attract hordes of tourists and their associated ecosystem of shops and street vendors. Not far away, a little remote, […]

When and where do we work? What used to be a very simple question is now a great matter a concern. Not only because a lot of workers have a mobile computer with which they can check their e-mails at […]

La Rochelle, august 2015. It’s summer time. The sun has been shining for several weeks, and a thin layer of dust covers the different professional nameplates of this notarial office. Cleaning these golden signs is part of the housekeeper’s work. […]

Milan, june 2015. The room is beautiful, yet empty but already illuminated, all dressed in red, and the stage seems so close. But to look at the balcony of the stall is not given to everyone when the show begins. […]

Paris, june 2015.

Paris, May 2015. The “coffee machine” is now a globalized device: work spaces and public spaces abound with these machines that produce “coffee”, “tea” and “cocoa” from unidentified substances and hot tap water. This is a real black box: no […]

A lot of things are needed for what we consider a decent living in our occidental rich countries. Tap water, stable electricity supply, roads, sidewalks (except maybe in L.A. ), a telecommunication network, public transportation… The list is quite long, […]

Paris, may 2015. Buying an helmet is a matter of security, since riding a motorcycle entails to wear this kind of head protector. Yet, as you enter a motorbike shop, other criteria rapidly challenge the secure one. Comfort and aesthetics […]

Madère, September 2014. The island was beautiful, the subtropical backgarden of a once European colonizer, where fruits were taking advantage of the volcanic land and plants the always plentiful water from the mountains. In the middle of the capital town, […]

The project had raised the most striking debates. Some people, the wealthiest, were completely opposed to it. They had found many circuitous routes to explain how bad this idea was, never telling directly why they actually didn’t want public housing […]

Paris, April 2015. Openness is on the rise. With the Internet, government data are made available to the public, academic papers are made available juste as they are published, computer code software is easily searchable and editable. Based on old […]

Paris, March 2015. Contemporary electronic spaces made us experience an economy of attention: if anyone can post notes, images, videos, comments in different public spaces, they then compete with the tens of millions of their siblings. The space they occupy […]

Our risk society is also a society of collective doubt and questioning. Experts talks no longer carry the old authority and those who are eligible to wobble certainties are becoming more numerous. Microwaves, shale gas, large urban projects, GMOs, vaccination […]

Paris, july 2011. The fluidity of the world rests on multiple connectors and numerous chambers. Among these flux regulators, doors are both a simple and sophisticated technology. Whatever its equipment and the world it opens to are, a door is […]

Western Massachussets, October 2013. The mailbox looked like any other one, with its cylindrical body and its flag to signal mail. As we were approaching, a sticker became visible: its colors had certainly faded, but its text was still readable: […]

Leiden, February 2015. With the rise of the internet, writing practices were dramatically transformed. Not only, text processing softwares allow one to interact very differently with words, by using a keyboard, but also with sentences and paragraphs that can be […]

Ivry, july 2014. There are codes that now seem shared. Due to the standardization of road signs, red became the color to indicate ban, would it be “do not play” or “do not park”. Conversely, blue embodies the color of […]

Bordeaux, February 2015. The French restaurant experience does not begin with white tablecloths and waiters dressed in black but starts out of the room, in front of a legal signage which has to be displayed with available food and drinks, […]

These days have brought a lot of newspapers at home. Paper journals, in addition to the digital ones. Like everybody else I guess, we were trying to build some kind of archives, real-time memories of what was happening. Though TV […]

Paris, January 2015. In a wireless connected world everything appears smooth and seamless. One navigates almost simultaneously in several spaces upon the flat surface of a screen, being the one of a laptop, a smartphone or a touchpad. One jumps […]

Paris & everywhere else, January 2015. In the streets, on TV, in newspapers, on social networks sites, on clothes: a few hours after the shock of the first murders, a graphic object has multiplied before our eyes, becoming a demonstration […]

Ivry-sur-Seine, December 2014. In the city, on sidewalks, neon yellow cubes had appeared at the end of the fall, without explanation or instructions. Faced with this new one, the mystery of their presence is resolved: they are built in the […]

Paris, November 2014. The globalization of markets delivers the same experience from one place to another, the certainty to fulfill our habits whether we are here or there, close to home or a ten-hour flight away. Against this homogenization, different […]

On a highway, October 2012. For a similar price, buying a car goes hand in hand with a range of customization options dedicated to increase security, confort, even dwelling, during journeys. From this point of view, a car equals dreaming, […]

Western Massachussets, May 2014 Feminism has pushed to treat domestic space as a workspace. Tasks that take place there are certainly not usually paid but they consume a significative part of waking hours, and primarily those of women. Despite multiple […]

Madeira, october 2014 A door & some keys. It is not a sophisticated digital device, on which some highly-resistant code should be typed to open it, but the recycling of keyboards that used to compose a map, that of the […]

Paris, may 2014. A group of international experts meet in a workshop about research assessment. Their discussions are at a very advanced stage, in particular regarding the traditional bibliometrics indicators based on citation in peer-reviewed journals compared to the challenging […]

I don’t know if you’ve heard about Skylanders, but you must admit it’s quite a good idea. It’s pretty simple. The characters of your video game are linked to figurines, which are « recognized » when you put them upon […]