This article pays tribute to Nicolas Nova (1977-2024), a professor at HEAD – Genève (HES-SO), who died during a trek in the Sultanate of Oman. A pioneer in studies that combined design, social sciences, and technology, this unclassifiable researcher explored the imaginaries, interstices, and paradoxes of digital objects, examining the tensions between industrial standardization and situated reappropriations. Co-founder of the Near Future Laboratory, he renewed technological narratives through the practice of “design fiction.” An inspiring teacher, he taught his students an ethnographic perspective, transforming the observation of everyday life into a lever for creation. The care given to the form of his works embodied his conviction to build bridges between academic research, design practices, and civil society. With some twenty books to his name, Nicolas Nova leaves behind a multifaceted body of work. His absence deprives technological criticism of an essential, lucid, curious, and poetic voice.

A teacher and researcher at HEAD – Genève, Nicolas Nova recently published the book Exercices d'observation, which invites us to train our attention skills. Composed of short texts, it is illustrated by sketches which are themselves ways of noting, classifying and ultimately thinking about the world and its small details. Nova sat down with Julie Enckell Julliard to talk about observation, a practice common to anthropologists and artists, which the reader is enjoined to cultivate and nurture in its different modes.

We are sharing a paper originally co-authored by Lysianne Léchot-Hirt and Nicolas Nova for the scientific periodical Techniques & Culture. The paper describes how the “creation-research” approach used by designers constitutes a unique form of technography, which may prove fruitful in the field of anthropology.

New technologies often come with harmful side effects, on both the ecological and psychosocial levels. Rather than putting the emphasis on novelty, Kris De Decker tries to address our human needs with articles about forgotten technologies, recycling, repairing, and ingenuity. De Decker publishes his articles online on Low-Tech Magazine, which he founded in 2007. The creation of a low-energy version of the Low-Tech Magazine website – powered by a solar panel installed on his balcony – not only combined the medium with its content, but demonstrates the creative potential to be gained from frugality. Design teacher and researcher Nicolas Nova (HEAD – Genève, HES-SO) – himself the author of a research project on cell phone repair stores – talks with De Decker about his exciting and inspiring editorial project and tackles the political significance of a paradigm shift from production to de-production, maintenance and repair.