#swisstechtalks: FAIL - the What and the Whys of technological flops

Why doesn’t anyone have the smart refrigerator that we have so often been told about? Why did the videophone never succeed in establishing itself at home, while video conferencing took little time to set up? While we rarely hear about the many prototypes that remain confined to start-ups or within the walls of laboratories, we more regularly attend “one-shots” without a future, who are mediatized and then abandoned: futuristic cars, gadgets whose interest is not captured or technologies “too far ahead of their time”.

About the speaker
Nicolas Nova is the Co-founder and Partner at the Near Future Laboratory,  formerly known as Lift Lab, is a design-to-think agency that combines insight and analysis with design and research with rapid prototyping to create potent provocative sometimes preposterous ideas into material form. It focuses on digital interaction designs based on “weak signals” from the fringes of digital culture, where the near-future already exists. It turns those weak signals into material form by rapidly constructing prototypes of innovative designs for near-future concepts.