By Renée Zachariou

The promise was enticing, and the menu quite mysterious: OWEE (Open Walked Event-based Experimentations) is a research protocol conducted by international researchers. After several experiments all over the world (in Tokyo and London), a tour in the 13th district of Paris was concocted, open to all. It is difficult to give a precise definition of OWEE without giving in to tautology: it is an experiment, while walking, while seeking. You’re welcome.

For this day dedicated to Street Art, we meet at 9 am on a gray Thursday in front of the square Luis Say (founder of Beghin-Say and, fun fact, brother of the liberal economist Jean-Baptiste Say), at the exit of the metro Glacière. Facing us, three facades completely covered with murals. On the left, a delicately rendered cat from the French artist C215, in front, a “freedom-equality-fraternity” muse in the iconic Obey style, on the right, … Read more

By François-Xavier de Vaujany and Viviane Sergi

Our learning expeditions and field trips following the OWEE protocol have often resulted in co-produced traces by means of various tools: posts on blogs (e.g. RGCS WordPress, the Conversation, LSE Business Review, LSE impact blog…) written by coordinators during and after the event, social networks (in particular Twitter, Facebook and Instagram), geolocalization systems (e.g. Samsung health systems) but also more specific collaborative technologies such as Stample or Framapads. The use of these tools aimed at narrating our events as they were happening, learning and reflecting from them, searching for political impact through better integrative and connective narratives.

We would like here to give a short feedback about two technologies we used: Framapads and Twitter and how they help us to co-produce reflexive traces of our events.

1. Framapad: great open technology, but atmosphere and animation are key

Framapad is a great … Read more

By Aurore Dandoy & François-Xavier de Vaujany

This summer, walking has been a trendy topic in French bookstores. Presented either as healthy practice, an opportunity for true, reflexive loneliness, a possibility to explore a territory, a new managerial approach or a political engagement, walk is an embodied practice at the heart of numerous trends and fashions today. Indeed, it is a very old practice. Aristotle taught philosophy while walking in the Lyceum of ancient Athens. Beyond the peripatetic school, situationists (with the practice of ‘drifting’) or revolutionaries (through walk as a protest) have all settled practice as a movement with possible political connotations.

Walk is also an experience. Moving from one place to another (see vignette 1 below) without thinking about it, there is something lived in-between. Walking as a group of researchers outside university walls is an intriguing liminal experience. For academics (and probably entrepreneurs…) experimenting … Read more

By François-Xavier de Vaujany and Albane Grandazzi

Our learning expeditions in collaborative spaces and our ethnographies of new work practices have been the opportunity to use numerous diaries, reports and note books to keep a trace of what we saw, what people said or what we felt.

Such a practice is not new in ethnography and auto-ethnography. Ethnographers have always collected and self-produced the narrative traces of their experience. They have always done it asynchronously (e.g. at the end of the day…) or synchronously (in the flow of what they were observing). We would like to stress here an embodied, material, visible aspect of ethnography as a practice: the gesturing of notes, sketches, traces of our shared experience with the people and societies explored.

More than ever, in a digital, largely disembodied, world, gestures and physical movements of the ethnographer are key micro-practices on the field. Our ethnographies and … Read more

By François-Xavier de Vaujany, PSL, Université Paris-Dauphine

The “derive” can be translated by the notion of “drift” in English. It is has been originally put forward in by Guy Debord, a member of the Letterist International,  in the context of his “Théorie de la derive” which was formalized in the late 50s. Debord defined dérive as “a mode of experimental behavior linked to the conditions of urban society: a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiances.” Dérive is a full improvised, an unplanned walked journey through an urban landscape. Still according to Debord, the maximum number of participants is three, which makes it possible to keep the integrity of the group in the process of improvisation. Through “derive”, participants are expected to suspend their everyday relations and “let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there”. Dérive aims at studying the … Read more

By Aurore Dandoy, François-Xavier de Vaujany and Annie Passalacqua

Aurore Dandoy, Université Paris Dauphine – PSL; Annie Passalacqua, HEC Montréal et François-Xavier de Vaujany, Université Paris Dauphine – PSL

As researchers and/or entrepreneurs, we have been absorbing cultural knowledge of collaboration, entrepreneurship, coworker and maker movements for a number of years. We often face and hear about how to become disruptive by two keywords: opening and hacking. Between July 25 and 28, 2018, we co-created a rich learning expedition organized by the Research Group on Collaborative Spaces (RGCS), at MIT and Harvard University, in Cambridge (Massachusetts). This alternative academic network focuses on topics about new work practices inspired by open science and citizen science cultures.

The starting point of our learning expedition was our astonishment: How can elite institutions (in particular, … Read more