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Enquêtes collectives et formats inventifs

How can we create spaces for co-inquiry, develop new forms of description, and rethink our engagement with public issues?

By integrating social sciences and design—drawing from Science and Technology Studies (STS) and pragmatism—we perceive problems as emerging and evolving through interactions among actors, objects, and research methods. Our team (designers, sociologists, artists, political scientists, and semioticians) creates experimental formats that blur the line between investigators and participants to better understand these issues.

Research

To describe well, one must intervene and care for its consequences.

From online speech circulation mediated by digital platforms to the impact of AI on labour practices, from the liminal presence of nature in urban settings to human pressure on marine ecosystems, or even the counting of deaths linked to humanitarian crises—a multitude of subjects that provoke individual troubles and public issues, which our team strives to describe and explore. In keeping with the tradition of pragmatist sociology, we build upon the approach initiated by the médialab’s founder, Bruno Latour, in his book-exhibition "Making Things Public", recognising the construction of problems as a dynamic co-production between academic and social spheres.

In dialogue with the digital methods developed at the médialab to trace social phenomena, we engage directly in the field. We create experimental spaces where the boundary between “observer” and “observed” dissolves, encouraging participants to become co-inquirers and critical operators of their practices, concerns, and challenges. Together, we continually redefine the scale, temporality, and modes of engagement with the issues we study.

A key feature of our approach is the careful articulation between established social science methods (ethnographies, interviews, data analysis) and the design of formats tailored to each research context—exhibitions, games, maps, fanzines, catalogues, video montages, and more. To avoid merely reproducing dominant narratives—especially given the increasing dysfunctions and normalisation of digital spaces—we construct experimental environments that allow us to take two critical risks: confronting digital traces with the lived experiences they claim to represent and producing accounts of what escapes digital inscription. In other words, rather than focusing solely on “which data speak about which actors,” our approach seeks to create an open laboratory where “data make the actors speak.”

We collaborate with a wide range of partners, from nonprofit organisations like Emmaüs Connect to philanthropic initiatives led by tech giants like Google.org. Our research, supported by international programs like ORA and national agencies like the ANR, often extends beyond traditional academic frameworks. This includes residencies in institutions like the Cité des Sciences, the Poudrerie Théâtre des Habitants in Sevran, the ZKM in Karlsruhe, and the HKV in Berlin.