Nathalie Guimbretière
Design Researcher
Nathalie Guimbretière works at the intersection of design research, anthropology and STS (science and technology studies). She develops protean devices — installations, audiovisual performances, interactive systems, speculative objects — that question the boundaries between the living, the technical and the imaginary. Her current work focuses on creative and reflective processes between artists and scientists, within the fields of organic robotics, astrophysics and material culture.

She is currently a postdoctoral researcher at LESC (CNRS / Université Paris-Nanterre) within the PEPR Organic Robotics programme (ANR / France 2030), where she coordinates the Maison des Humanités Potentielles. She is also an associate researcher at the Centre de Recherche en Design (ENS Paris-Saclay / ENSCI), at the Institut d’Astrophysique Spatiale (CNRS / Paris-Saclay) and a member of the Chaire Espace (ENS Ulm – PSL).

Nathalie holds a doctorate in arts from Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier III (2022). She has exhibited and performed internationally — Berlin, Montréal, Reykjavík, New York, Conakry, Syracuse — and is supported by Stereolux (Nantes). Co-founder of the collective Pronaos (Paris).

Her work takes the form of publications in academic journals in design and STS (ACM CHI, Academic Mindtrek, Revue Plastir, À l’épreuve...), practice-based research experimental devices (Protolexique, Tribunal des technologies, Cinémathèque des imaginaires techniques), immersive and performative installations (Cosmic Utopia, Laboratoire Arianna, Hi-brides, Eidôlon).

Themes
Technical imaginaries and design trajectories
Design research and practice-based methodologies
Art-science collaborations
Soft robotics and hybrid materialities
Anthropology of techniques
Current research
Experimental Devices
Publications Conferences
Teaching
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Research-Creation and Practice-Based Research - Experimental Devices

In a practice-based research approach, the following devices function simultaneously as methods of inquiry, sites of data production, and forms of publication. They contribute to the elaboration of situated knowledge about technical imaginaries.

ProtolexiqueAn evolving lexicon negotiated between roboticists, anthropologists, designers, and biologists. Each entry articulates a visual, a collective definition, disciplinary perspectives, contradictory citations, and a bibliography. The terms created — métaxytechne, xénomorphose, hylopsychisme — are conceptual tools for exploring the transformations of matter and the imaginaries linked to technological systems.
The device makes visible the frictions between disciplinary vocabularies and reveals zones of conceptual non-overlap between robotics, biology, and design.
Format: Web application (JavaScript/HTML), open source. 150 entries online.

Tribunal des technologiesA collective deliberative format. Rather than evaluating technologies through dominant criteria (efficiency, performance, cost), the Tribunal mobilises alternative criteria: repairability, hospitality, sustainability. Witnesses summoned: researchers, practitioners, users, objects. Figures of decentring: alien judges, advocates of the absent (future generations, extinct species, invisibilised workers).
Format: Deliberative performance with alien jury, sound recording and documentary film. The device generates data on the justification regimes mobilised in the face of emerging technologies.
First edition: March 2025, PEPR O2R annual conference, Lille. Publication: chapter in Technocritique(s) (2026).

Cinémathèque des imaginaires techniquesA corpus of industrial films, laboratory archives, and demonstration videos (1950–2026), indexed and analysed through montage inspired by Aby Warburg’s Atlas Mnemosyne. The interest lies in what these images show without intending to: backgrounds, operators’ gestures, hesitations, failures cut during editing. The montage produces visual hypotheses about continuities and ruptures in the imaginaries of robotics.
Status: 100 videos indexed (objective: 200). 3 critical video essays in preparation.

Design d’ethnofictionA crossing of ethnographic data and speculative narratives. From tensions observed in the field, the method constructs scenarios that amplify potentialities. Each ethnofiction is accompanied by objects belonging to the imagined world. These object-scenarios function as design probes: they provoke reactions, generate discussions, reveal presuppositions. Methodology inspired by speculative design (Dunne & Raby) and experimental ethnography (Marcus).
Current: Seminar « Prototype Stories » (ENS Paris-Saclay, ENSCI) since 2024. Studio ENSCI «Ethnofiction(s)» with A. Behar. 

Projet « Éthique du numérique » — Born SocialA programme on digital manipulation mechanisms, developed in collaboration with Le Cube (Garges-lès-Gonesse) and ENSCI. Workshops with young people from priority neighbourhoods, generating data on the representations of algorithms and AI among adolescents in contexts of precarity.
Status: Ongoing (2025). Publication: research report and article for Réseaux in preparation.