Joelle Bitton

Joëlle Bitton is an artist and a human-computer interaction researcher. She currently teaches at the Zurich University of the Arts in Interaction Design. With her works, Joëlle explores a sense of material intimacy and personal geography with machines and systems. She likes most to entangle strangeness and familiarity together. As such, in her doctoral thesis at Harvard University Graduate School of Design, she created interactive fabrication processes with personal data as a way for individuals to have an intuitive control of machines.

At Media Lab Europe in Dublin, she explored the mediation of technologies in human relationships and their potential social impact, notably with the projects "RAW" and "Passages". She also conducted similar research studies on the creative uses of technologies at Culture Lab, Newcastle University. She graduated from Université Paris Sorbonne with a dissertation in history on the 19th-century rise of nations correlated with the development of networks and technologies.

She advocates for the de-evangelisation of technologies and design as problem-solvers and as markers of progress.

Education

2016
* Doctorate of Design (DDes) "Measure of Abstraction: Embodied Fabrication and the Materiality of Intimacy"
Harvard University Graduate School of Design

2000
* MA New Media Studies
Telecom Paris / École Nationale des Beaux-Arts de Paris

1999
* DEA Contemporary History (History of Technology): "Machines de l'Imaginaire"
University Paris IV Sorbonne

1997
* MA Geography (Geopolitics): "Guyana: Identities and political conflicts in a multi-ethnic society"
University Paris I Sorbonne

1996
* BA in History
University Paris I Sorbonne

Publications

• 2016
  Joëlle Bitton, "Form Following Itself, The Case for Embodied Fabrication", position paper for the workshop “CrossFAB”, CHI 2016, San Jose.

• 2016
  Poster “Embodied Fabrication: Controlling machines with personal data” presented at the Symposium on Computation Fabrication, 19th-20th of April 2016, Strata Center, MIT

• 2011
  J. Bitton and A. Tanaka, “Co-creative use of digital technologies in a post-colonial context”, ISEA 2011, Istanbul.

• 2008
  Joëlle Bitton, “Flirting Across a Distance”, Ambidextrous Magazine, 10, 2008, Stanford University.

• 2006
  J. Bitton, “Distance and Sexuality: where HCI meets convenience and affinity”, position paper for the workshop “Sexual Interactions: Why We Should Talk About Sex in HCI”, CHI 2006, Montreal.

• 2004
  J. Bitton, S. Agamanolis, and M. Karau, “RAW: Conveying minimally-mediated impressions of everyday life with an audio-photographic tool”, Full Paper, CHI 2004, Vienna.