About

“Mobile Repair Cultures” is a research project at the Geneva School of Art and Design (HEAD – Genève) into repair practices, ethnography and product/interaction design. Funded by the Swiss National Research Fund, it investigates informal repair cultures by looking at mobile phones and smartphones repair places, and hypothesise that they play an important, yet unrecognized, role in ecosystems of innovation.

Using an ethnographic approach focused on Swiss unlicensed stores and hackerspaces, we want to (a) understand of the forms of repair and transformation of these technical objects, (b) investigate how these practices are constructed and deployed considering that such technologies are often closed or quite opaque, (c) grasp the role and the innovative character of these practices in the context of product or interaction design.

Project researchers

Nicolas Nova is an ethnographer and design researcher, working both as Associate Professor at the Geneva School of Arts and Design (HEAD – Genève) and as co-founder of The Near Future Laboratory, a research organization based in Europe and California. His work focuses on observing and documenting digital and new media practices, as well as creating design fictions, i.e. speculative designed objects exploring the experiences of near future. He holds a PhD in Human-Computer Interaction from the Swiss Institute of Technology (EPFL, Switzerland) and was previously a visiting scholar at Art Center College of Design (Pasadena) and Polictecnico di Milano.

Publications:

Anais Bloch is a design researcher with over six years’ experience at leading design projects and socio-cultural research. Anais has worked both as designer and anthropologist with companies, associations, charities, in the heritage sector and in the education sector. After a first degree in product design at the University of Art and Design in Lausanne (ECAL), she studied a masters in anthropology at University College London (UCL) where she graduated in 2014.

About

Project researchers

Nicolas Nova

Publications:

Anaïs Bloch

Publications: