info

About l’Atelier

L’Atelier des chercheurs is a collective of designers who, since 2013, have been creating free and modular tools to transform the way we learn and work. These tools are mostly made in collaboration with people in the field, in places as varied as schools, fablabs, third places or theaters.

Our approach, which we call situated, involves time spent observing and many exchanges with our partners, as well as testing working prototypes in the situations we set up with them. Our tools are therefore co-designed and adapted to contexts and practices, so they can live on in the places they were created for. This approach opens up the creative process and, through mutual learning, makes it possible to support and transform practices without presupposing either the needs or the solutions.

The prototypes we produce evolve iteratively and lead to successive versions, refined over time through observation, tests and feedback. They are enriched by the variety of our partners’ experiences and situations, and can take many forms — software, installations, objects to handle, etc. Released under free licenses and documented online, these tools can then easily be reused and adopted by other people, for other uses and in other situations.

Feel free to get in touch through the forum or using the information below if you want to know more or work with us.

The forum

We host a forum: feel free to post there any issues you run into when using our tools, or to share what you make with them:

→ forum.latelier-des-chercheurs.fr

Contact

You can contact us by email at: info@latelier-des-chercheurs.fr.


a note on internship requests
We are honored to receive your internship and work-study requests, but we are currently unable to host interns. However, if you would like to meet us or talk about our projects or yours, our door is open!

Team

Current members

Former members

Partners

Our partners are mostly located all over France. Among them are primary school teachers and trainers, fab managers, members of associations, researchers... We would especially like to mention and thank:

  • The Lacordaire school, and in particular Serge Selvestrel, first grade teacher, Paris 15th, and Olivier Fosse, educational technology trainer at the Académie de Paris.
  • The Louis Armand high school, Paris 15th, with Antony Meunier, engineering and sustainable development (STI2D) teacher.
  • Lionel Rault, primary school teacher and educational advisor - departmental digital technology referent - DSDEN of the Côtes d'Armor.
  • The 110 bis, innovation lab of the French Ministry of Education
  • Le Carrefour Numérique<sup>2</sup>, the Fablab and Living Lab of the Cité des Sciences in Paris.
  • The Studio-Théâtre de Vitry, with whom we have been creating the tool Les Cahiers du Studio since May 2017.
  • A 4th grade class in New York and its teacher Jennifer Kaiser.
  • The Blé en Herbe kindergarten & primary school in Trébédan, Côtes d’Armor, and its head teacher Nolwenn Guillou.
  • The Gaîté Lyrique, the LabSchool and the contributors to the project Capitaine Futur et la supernature.
  • The Center for Research and Interdisciplinarity and the Savanturiers, who develop education through research from primary school onwards.
  • The Labex Arts-H2H at Université Paris 8, laboratory of excellence for arts and human mediations.
  • The École nationale supérieure des Arts Décoratifs de Paris, and more specifically its graphic and multimedia design department.
  • Les Bâtisseurs de possibles, a network of teachers who want students to become actors of their learning, of society and of their lives.
  • Désert Numérique, an association founded in 2009 in Saint-Nazaire-le-Désert (Drôme) to promote digital arts and interdisciplinary practices in rural areas.
  • The Studio Design, a project incubation space within the Télécom ParisTech school.
  • The association DLP15, which runs civic, cultural, educational and social programs in the 15th arrondissement of Paris.

Recent talks and workshops

Our work has been presented many times since 2015, notably at the Festival D, Futur en Seine, the Designer’s Days, the Numok Festival, the Vidéo Sciences Festival, etc.

A non-exhaustive list of our talks and workshops in 2018 and 2019:

  • three weeks of residency in three rural schools in the Drôme, helping classes create a TV show with do•doc (April 2019)

  • a talk at the Gobelins school for the Interaction Design master’s program, and project mentoring (April 2019)

  • a one-week workshop at the École nationale supérieure des Arts Décoratifs de Paris with 4th and 5th year graphic and multimedia design students, to think about and create with them a documentation tool across departments and levels

  • a workshop on creating sensitive maps and collecting geolocated data at Stéréolux in Nantes (December 2018)

  • two workshops on prototyping and situated design for the Innovation & Digital Transformation master’s program at Sciences Po Paris (October 2018)

  • a workshop on building documentation stations, a hands-on session and a presentation of our work and approach at FAB14edu, the big FabLab conference, in Bataville (July 2018).
    Read the report (made with do•doc): latelier-des-chercheurs.fr/compte-rendus/fab14edu/

  • a talk during the Documenting artistic production: data, tools, uses days at the Villa Arson, in Nice (June 2018)

  • a one-week residency in Cobonne, Drôme, helping a class create a newspaper with do•doc (April 2018)

  • a public talk about our approach, research and tools at the Machinerie fablab in Amiens (April 2018)

  • a one-week residency in a kindergarten class of the Blé en Herbe school, in Brittany (April 2018)

  • interview in Ludomag: Dialogue between pedagogy, design and research (April 2018, in French)

  • a workshop at EcriTech 9: Classroom experiments: dialogue between pedagogy, design and research, where we discussed how pedagogical thinking evolves by integrating digital issues and seizing design opportunities in real situations, with Nolwenn Guillou, in Nice (April 2018)

  • a public talk presenting our work and tools at PrePostPrint, an event about alternative publishing tools at the École nationale supérieure des Arts Décoratifs de Paris (April 2018)

  • a public talk at ésad Amiens as part of the themed week "On the Shoulders of Giants", about free and open source software in graphic creation and design (March 2018)

  • a talk presenting our tools and approach at AFK, at Le Tank in Paris (February 2018)

  • a keynote at ixd18, the international Interaction Design conference, in Lyon (February 2018)