Updated 03 March: links added  Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – The title of the fourth annual Lift conference, “Where did the future go?” was set long before the current global crisis started making daily headlines. The idea, Lift found Laurent Haug says, came out of a feeling that we have reached a turning point with technology, where we have a need to look back to our ideas about the future as well as forward. The topic has attracted a record attendance of some 800 people to Lift09, which kicked off Thursday morning 26 February.

Patrick Gyger, Maison d'Ailleurs

”We live the dreams and the nightmares of our parents at the same time,” says Patrick Gyger, who heads the Maison d’Ailleurs science fiction museum in Yverdon, Switzerland. “There is no way only our material world would change leaving society intact,” he argues, suggesting that science fiction helps us reflect on the impact of new technologies. “Science fiction helps us understand that we have choices.” It is, he says, one “way to study our notions of progress.”

Gyger’s comments were part of the first presentations at Lift, which moved straight into the conference theme: “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?”

Gyger took his audience through a trip down memory lane – the land of flying cars and wristphones, objects that were never built, but whose dreams captured the imagination. “Science fiction really created the desire to build a flying car.” But the flying car, having been so iconic of the future, has no place in the present. There are objects that have made their way into our psyche but now have no place,” he believes, pointing to the wristphone.

And yet dreaming of them, adding them to a science fiction future, has allowed us to create other things, such as cell phones. “The communications videophone was very icnomic of the future – today, we have Skype.”

Nicolas Nova: located! but not everyone wants to be found

The science fiction objects we have discarded are part of a larger group of failures – which should be perceived as good things in many cases, says Nicolas Nova, Swiss researcher who has worked with many labs, including EPFL in Lausanne, where he took his PhD in human-computer interaction.

”Failures generally result in more detailed critiques. People are interested in failures and in talking about them, in documenting how to improve.” He points to the iPhone as an example of a product that built on past failures by other companies.

”There’s a need to spot failures, to document them, to improve.” He refers to the recurring failure of holy grails, “all those products of the past that failed.” He believes that “Generally, failures are good ideas before their time.” Visiophone was a failure as a phone, but “if you look at Skype, how people are using it, it’s not a failure People are using it.”

A poor understanding of users is one of the problems behind failures. “It’s important to think about exceptions. The “average human” is a myth. Exceptions need to be taken into account.” He offers the example of the “smart fridge,” which tracks a family’s food consumption and as stocks get low, based on previous eating habits, the system orders new supplies online.

The smart fridge never really took off, he believes, because people weren’t really ready to pay for what they saw as too small a benefit. There were privacy concerns but people also don’t necessarily want to eat the same things two weeks in a row. It’s the exceptions that might be the biggest snag. “If you have a system that does this sort of thing, it’s likely there will be exceptions. Someone will go on vacation, Granny doesn’t like the smart fridge so she goes to the store, buys something, gets back home and discovers it’s already in the fridge.”

Another reason for failures is that “as humans we think of the short term. . . We mistake the short term for changes that happen in the long term, and we tend to believe that new technology suddenly appears and is changing rapidly.” In fact, Nova says, change is a long-term process. The arrival of the web was disruptive as was the arrival of digital cameras. Neither was created overnight. “Change is really slow to happen.”

Designers increasingly look for “natural” solutions to help new technology be accepted, but what is accepted as natural is constantly shifting, but often slowly, over time.

As for the future, some of our science fiction dreams for the future are still there, Patrick Gyger points out: “Space colonies haven’t happened. But the race for space is still there.”

Related: Swiss trends site (Ger) futurebytes.ch

Nicolas Nova’s blog (Pasta & Vinegar) post on his speech

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