Lift13: Make Innovation Happen

Held yearly in Geneva in February, Lift is a conference-event focusing on innovation that has become an international staple that many believe should not to be missed. For the eighth consecutive year, in 2013 Lift attracted inspirational speakers and pioneers of innovation eager to explore current technology trends.

The 2013 event title "Make Innovation Happen" clearly conveyed the theme at the heart of the celebratory programme, and it is no coincidence that the conference's elected location is where the web was born. Young English physicist Tim Berners-Lee went to work at CERN, the world's leading physics laboratory, as a software engineering consultant in 1980; here is where he created the first software that stored information and brought order to the growing quantity of data produced by the computers used for scientific experiments. That prototype, never exported and intended only for internal use, was to form the conceptual basis for the future development of the World Wide Web.

The conference itself is divided into several sessions focusing on the intersection between sociology and technology, with presentations and ideas from some of the greatest innovators worldwide. The traditional conference is held in the CICG auditorium in Geneva, but Lift also features a packed fringe programme of workshops, events, venture nights and exhibitions for students and start-uppers local and international, all in a relaxed and open atmosphere.



Above: Grand-Central by Thibault Brevet, his bachelor diploma project at ECAL / University of Art and Design Lausanne.

The common thread linking all the themes addressed by the speakers — and this is the true reason behind Lift's international success — is the exploration of the social repercussions of technology, in both the working and personal worlds. Every speech rests on the axiom that technology and society influence each other: sometimes it is technology that changes the way we live and sometimes the reverse occurs, when a user transforms the technology by applying it to uses other than those envisaged by companies and developers.

Consistently carried forward throughout its main event in Switzerland — with satellite manifestation in Asia and France —, the aim of the Lift conference is to pinpoint the challenges, critical factors and opportunities that arise in the multicoloured and omnipresent world of technological innovation, turning these innovations into opportunities for economic, social and personal growth.

The contents of Lift are further enriched by the constant interaction among people from very different backgrounds — students, entrepreneurs, artists, engineers, journalists, designers, sociologists, communication professionals, lawyers and university professors. This year, the speakers were flanked by more than 1,000 participants from 30 countries. Not surprisingly, many see Lift as a prized context, a microcosm of excellences, where ideas are born and where ideas meet.

This beneficial circulation of ideas and proposals for the future is reinforced by the general sense of informality that hangs in the air, by the strong focus on the content of the presentations and by the desire to share, seen rarely at similar encounters. Many conferences target the already successful, but Lift wants to be the conference for those who will be successful in the future. Little-known international speakers feel at home because at Lift they can show that they are ready to become reference thinkers.

This year, the conference attracted people from groups and organisations such as Wipro, MIT Media Lab, Futurescaper, Etsy, Arduino and Freitag. Roaming the halls were also activists such as Greece's Konstantina Zoehrer, researchers and the CEOs of start ups, sounding out the impact of digital technology on our lives.

The widespread but underground presence of commercial brands and firms did cause some early purists — those enthusiasts who meet up in Geneva every year to reflect on the interaction between technology and society — to turn up their noses but such critics may have missed the fact that one of the principal themes this year was, indeed, whether it is possible for companies to unite traditional values and new technology — old skills and contemporary aesthetics — and being both craft- and global-oriented, by developing new ways to design and distribute; innovative business models and human-resource management based on ethics and a respect for mankind.

The standard of the debate was raised, in particular, by the most critical and intellectual interventions concerning the link between science-fiction, technological research and design by American writer Bruce Sterling and by Anthony Dunne, director of the Design Interactions programme at the Royal College of Art in London and founder — with Fiona Raby — of Dunne & Raby, a duo that has always used design as a medium to stimulate reflections between designers, industry and the public on the social, cultural and ethical implications of existing and emerging technologies.

The great challenge for Lift, and other conferences, has always been managing to bring participants and speakers together. In Geneva, they tried to facilitate encounters with a packed calendar of workshops. The most successful was certainly "Harming and Protecting Robots: Can we, should we?", which explored the ethical and social rebellion against what might just lead to emotional blackmail on the part of robots against humans. Luisa Castiglioni