WELCOME TO THE CODESIGN LAB

Our team focuses on « extreme design », that is design that redefines its traditional limits and explores new territories and unconventional practices and collaborations in: science, society, politics, and art.
Find more on our team, or more on our projects. We also have a website dedicated to publications and conferences: vademecumdesign.

Working session

Fundamental design
We build a semiotic model of design as a “meaning making” process that studies the rationale of design through a diversity of situations of conception to elucidate methods and concepts.

Applied design
We elaborate methods to build artefacts and services that test our hypotheses on design as a meaning making process articulating engineering, social sciences, and humanities. We therefore work closely with engineering scientists to develop new media: distributed mobile architectures, pervasive computing, connected objects, virtual intelligent agents,…

Social design
We study new design practices such as critical design, ludic design, speculative design and more generally all forms of exploratory design and generative practices in society.

Tricky questions

• Why is the design of infrastructures political?
• What are the poetical practices supporting design (naming, narrating, performing?)
• How does design produce the future?
• How could design artefacts articulate a debate?
• What is the relation between design and playfulness?
• Can design support specific emotions?
• How unconventional practices such as hacking, or trolls, redefine political participation?

Facts

The Codesignlab was founded in 2003 by Annie Gentès. It is part of the department of social and economic sciences of Telecom ParisTech and belongs to the Interdisciplinary Institute of Innovation (i3), http://www.i-3.fr/.

The Codesign Lab has been involved in 16 research projects spanning over distributed Networks, virtual intelligent agents, cultural heritage and crowdsourcing, pervasive computing and game design.
It works within Industrial contracts, public research contracts, European programs.
With a diversity of partners: museums and cultural institutions( Paris, Museum of Arts and Crafts, Museum of Decorative Arts, Réunion des Musées nationaux, Marseilles: Friche Belle de Mai), industrial partners (Alcatel Lucent, Thales, Orange, 3S Informatique, Renault, …), academic partners (CNAM, ENSCI, Mines ParisTech…)

About the word “co-design”
Electronic and computer scientists speak of co-design when they want to describe the way hardware anticipates software and software adapts to hardware, both evolving towards a better integration. Introduced by Isabelle Demeure and Annie Gentes, this concept of CoDesign research spans over the different layers of integrations including social and cultural facets of these new media.

CodesignLab-Women at the frontiere

Disciplines?

Our research is based on several disciplines: communication & information sciences, semiotics & design research, philosophy, sociology of science & technology and human computer interface. We want to analyze design practices and productions. In particular, we develop and test new man-machine interactive systems to better understand meaning making in design and engineering.

WHERE TO FIND US?

CONTACT

annie.gentes[at]telecom-paristech[dot]fr