Presentation - Program - Registration

This third edition of the New Industrial World Forum builds on the commitments made over the past two years on heightened innovation and collaborative technologies from a design and industrial conception perspective. In 2008, we focused on the question of social networks. This year, we would like to further discuss the concept of communicating objects and the new “system of objects”.

The first day will concentrate on defining this new category of industrial objects emerging between the material and the virtual. Communicating objects will be looked at in the context of their surrounding economic and technological environment. The day will close with a Carrefour des possibles held by the FING (Next-Generation Internet Foundation) on the technological and industrial aspects of these topics. The second day will deal with the social and organizational consequences of this new “system of objects”. It will be an ideal opportunity for the actors affiliated with these communicating objects to discuss the reconfiguration of space, time, and things disrupted by the new object system.

The emergence of sensor and actuator technologies have contributed to the “Internet of things”, and the vast development of technological traceability, which is already part of the Internet economic model, changes the organization of the virtual and the real while information continues to emerge and re-emerge. We can see a new “system of objects” being created.

These discussions allow us to encounter various positions and expectations regarding a subject where a standard definition is yet to be shared. Different viewpoints will be expressed and social issues relating to use and specifications as well as more technical definition (traceability, chips, barcodes…) will be explained.

The definition of this new industrial object necessarily evokes material and corporal change – from the finger to the whole body, from the IPhone to pots and pans – as well as the reorganization of private and public spaces. Technical aspects will also be discussed (standards, data management) along with the key players in these transformations.

The New Industrial World Forum 2009 aims to show how the process of connecting space and things is just as important in research as it is in industry.