Collaborations

Are new technologies making waves in your field? Do you have the ambition to build sustainable success? Is human adoption important to you? Then there is a great chance that we can build a fruitful collaboration. Over the last 20 years, many digital inventions have failed because they focus only on technical performance. Partnerships with the EPFL+ECAL Lab bring the missing pieces: exploring fields of use, understanding meaning and adoption factors, and integrating subjective perception and cultural context.

Over 15 years of collaboration

The EPFL+ECAL Lab has over 15 years experience working with academic, commercial and institutional partners. From this, we know that successful projects come from complementary competencies addressing society’s most pressing topics.

The EPFL+ECAL Lab is proud to have had success with large international groups. Our Chronogram project is now the main interactive installation in Vacheron Constantin’s flagship stores in New York, Dubai and soon in Los Angeles. But pride comes also from social success: the Resoli app, for example, counts more than 5000 events organised by older people in the Swiss canton of Vaud. This awarded collaboration with social association Pro Senectute addresses the challenge of loneliness in later life, but also defines new approaches to build inclusive digital services.

Results and learnings from these contexts have also fueled projects with cultural institutions including the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, the Swiss National Library, and the Museum für Gestaltung in Zürich. In the field of wellbeing, our partnership with the biggest Taoist temple in Europe defines how disruptive technologies and design can be adopted by a culture dating back millennia, whilst still being recognized by an international academic publication (SIGGRAPH 2021). We also count several transfers with start up companies.

Research assistants in the field as part of a collaboration with Swissnex in India, Bangalore, 2020
Research assistants in the field, collaboration with Swissnex in India, 2020

In 2023, the EPFL+ECAL Lab started two large European projects, SWITCH, addressing healthy and sustainable diets (11MM €), and Mount Resilience, on climate adaptation (20MM €), extending the lab’s international network in innovation and research dramatically.

Affiliation

Founding partner

Academic partners

Project partners

EPFL research labs