Technology and Innovation

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The journal Technologie et Innovation had published a second issue dedicated to the representations of technology in audiovisual fictions. Science fiction films therefore captured the interest of most of the researchers who participated. The articles question in particular the impact of often dystopian fictions on the creation of a technophobic climate potentially harmful to innovation. Virtual reality, “total memory” technologies, connected homes, artificial intelligence, medical technologies, neurotechnologies and video games are thus the subject of futuristic fictions warning the viewer about the negative uses of these machines. Faced with the thesis of a performative science fiction, science fiction is therefore conceived as an obstacle to innovation. The sum of this research directs us towards a conception of these stories as a cathartic imaginary, capable of considering the worst to purge the innovation process of negative passions, thus freeing capitalism and R&D to generate products that are sources of progress to humanity.

Since the 1980s, home automation and the digital home have been announced as the new era, ideal for the rest of housewives, and safe for families. However, if many university and industrial research laboratories are working hard on it, the market does not seem to take off in reality. This brake on success turns out to be partially, at least, linked to the collective imagination of the house of the future: many fictional elements concerning it deal with a form of black utopia, unconsciously charging the mind with a certain fear of what might happen. This article aims to highlight the difficult but inevitable relationship between works of science fiction and research on the house of the future.

This paper presents a classification of the various types of "total memory" technologies that have been imagined in a corpus of audiovisual science fiction between 1990 and 2022. These technologies, which often use the metaphor of memory as a database or plan, are depicted as allowing for the digitization and storage of human memories, as well as the retrieval and even modification of these memories and the identities of individuals. Through this analysis, this paper aims to explore such technological innovations for the enhancement or alteration of human mnemonic abilities.

Through a prospective reading of a science fiction movies selection, the author examines the evolution of the relationship that our so-called modern societies have with the human body — between research and phantasms, contemporary ethics and new ontology, contemporary expectations and future challenges. The films on which the author relies are Gattaca (1997, directed by Andrew Niccol), Blade Runner (1982, by Ridley Scott), Morgan (2016, Luke Scott), Repo Men (2010, Miguel Sapochnik), Terminator: Dark Fate (2019, Tim Miller), Selfless (2015, Tarsem Singh) and Chappie (2015, Neill Blomkamp). He thus tackles three key subjects such as they are dealt with in the speculative futures of these films, but which have their roots in our present: the genetic revolution and the risks of eugenics, the biomechanical revolution and the commercial temptation and, finally, a human ontology disrupted by the emergence of new alterities. In conclusion, the author offers an interpretation of the evolution of these relationships to the body, which he calls ―From sacred body to merchandised body‖.

If technology is a major theme in science fiction (SF), its treatment in movies is heterogeneous. Based on a comparative analysis of three artworks of science fiction, Star Trek, The Matrix and Black Mirror, the article proposes to build a continuum of analysis about the place and role of technology in works of science-fiction. At one end of the continuum, technology is a background that is not the subject of debate, but which, eventually, is a framework that facilitates a debate on a societal issue. At another extreme, technology is threatening and consubstantially opens the door to post-humanism. Between the two extremes, SF provides a critique of the perverse and cynical uses that our societies make of new technologies.

Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror series is a futuristic projection of new technologies whose primary objective is to improve our daily lives. The series examines artificial intelligence, digitalisation, gamification and robotisation of our daily lives, augmented reality and virtual reality. The mirror held up by Charlie Brooker is sometimes blackened, sometimes true to our reality. The series reflects the utopian intentions of the technologies implemented and shows to what extent human use reminds us of the dangers and highlights the dystopian side of all these new technologies when man appropriates or distorts them to serve his own interests. These works of anticipation, by hybridising the fictional and the real, reveal both the dystopian and the mirror aspects, allowing the viewer to engage in both a reflective and self-reflexive process.

This article reports on the research conducted during my PhD “Color in the visual environment: perception(s), reading(s), interpretation(s) and impact(s) on the elderly user. From the perspective of the lighting engineer (science and technology of lighting systems) and the color designer (applied art, design)”. Starting from the premise that maintaining the ability of older people to carry out their daily activities is an important lever for maintaining their quality of life, I have developed a new design method. It’s combines color design and lighting science and represents the beginning of a non-pharmacological strategy that leads to the design of environments adapted to the needs of older users with visual impairments. This study shows that this strategy can also be applied to cognitive disorders. This systemic approach is thus a driving force for a social innovation that breaks with current methods of care.

Recent pandemics have forced most companies to experiment with remote working to varying degrees. Despite the exceptional productivity of employees in this crisis context and the desire of employees to continue working remotely, the most innovative companies are making a strong case for more face-to-face work. This movement, called ”return to the office" is seen as the only way to create effective collaboration in innovative teams. In this paper, we show that the „return to the office‟ argument is based on a narrow conception of face-to-face trust or affect-based trust, as the main driver of collaborative dynamics. On the contrary, drawing on trust and innovation management research, we emphasize that distance does not limit the production of effective trust for innovative teams. Moreover, we propose a new articulation between two forms of trust, swift trust and reflective trust, i.e., the “swift reflective trust”, to support a new hybrid way of working that fosters collaboration and innovation.

The French army’s Red Team program consists of creating science fiction stories with the aim of anticipating conflicts that could threaten the territory by 2030-2060. Part of the trend of institutional science fiction, it is based on the capacity to arouse the cognitive strangeness dear to Darko Suvin and to create novum (imaginary technologies) vectors of difficulties, but also of solutions in the wars of the future. If certain novum have a performative function, the diegesis, that is to say the spatiotemporal environment of the story, takes on more of a dysperformative dimension. These stories seek to arouse the reaction of soldiers to imaginary dangers so that they implement strategies in advance to avoid their occurrence. Science fiction authors capture the unconscious of organizations and reveal their prophetic imaginaries. Innovism is also a true ideology pragmatically using the imaginary to question the established order and generate new ideas that are sources of creative destruction. The Red Team also brings the French army into a regime of historicity oriented towards the future, more than towards the battles of the past. Science fiction is also a paradoxical genre, involving a specific interpretation of reality and the future. It is therefore appropriate to question the advantages and possible disadvantages linked to the use of a paradoxical vision of the future in the development of an organization’s strategies aimed above all at efficiency and pragmatism.

In the light of the contributions of the logics of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and disruptive innovations [ADA, 18] and research issues on solutions for participatory qualification of impact data recalling older questions and analyzes including the Condorcet paradox [CON 85] and the incompleteness theorem of Arrow [ARR 51] or of Nobel Prize winner Amartya Sen [SEN 70] on the evolution of economic models towards an economy of well-being with collective choice we propose possible responses for co-construction of new highly collaborative open qualification tools and processes [PAU 12]. By taking into account the diversity of open innovation actors to integrate the capabilities augmented by AI, we manage to integrate ex ante into highly democratic processes and AI tools the diversity of evolving determinants of opinions on the perceived impacts on everything. topics of common interest expressed. This leads our research towards the discovery [PAU 22] of a third typology of AI in addition to the symbolic one and the connective one: the Qualificative Artificial Intelligence (QuAI) - with the ability to integrate human critical thinking. New spaces – QuAI tools, collaborative open qualification processes – can thus lead to optimal choices through collaboration and the collective creation of relevance and trust, particularly through new dynamic capabilities that potentially create disruptive innovations. Several usage functionalities are identified in terms of developments towards a functionality economy [VAI, 20]. and the democratization of access and contribution to impact data aimed at disruptive innovative solutions and tools for resilience [SCH 22] considering the multifaceted (economic, climate change, confidence) crises [PAU 09, 12, 18].