How can we envision a future that is part of everyday life and its “pragmatic reality “, while avoiding reductionism, simplism and paralysis in front of an increasingly complex world? The immensity of the task can lead to the renunciation of developing a pure imagination. This projection creates a tension between the experience of the everyday world and the prospective exercise. This leads to a permanent contortion unbalancing the very foundations of research.

Yet it remains possible to make intelligible the inherent complexity of the world. This is an art of composition which requires understanding, anticipation, and action. By adjusting different points of view, by looking back at history, by envisioning the future, this permanent effort of composition makes it possible to define representations of reality that are both comprehensible and holistic. These contemporary approaches to philosophy allow us to “return to the ordinary” by seeking to free ourselves from not considering the most banal human realities.

This is the adage of research. Our mission is to explore the “everyday” while constantly reinventing the future. The everyday refers to what belongs to the daily routine, commonalities, or frequent events. The “everyday life” therefore represents the passing of typical days for individuals and organizations. A common day includes routine actions and ultimately involves certain rituals that vary between individuals and between organizations. Alain Berthoz helps us to understand these phenomena by defining “simplexity”, which designates a set of solutions found by living organisms that, despite the complexity of natural processes, “operate” and act in this daily routine. Simplexity establishes the general characteristics of these solutions: modularity, redundancy, and inhibition. In fact, living processes are very complex, in the sense that they involve many elements (molecules, cells, atoms, particles) and many operations. Despite this visible complexity, the living being acts “apparently” simply without having to consider all these elements or actions at each moment. This is a major illustration of everyday activities’ complexity.

The major challenge of our research is to apprehend this complexity and to elaborate “probably approximately correct” representations (Leslie Valiant) of it. Our objective remains first and foremost to integrate this complexity to establish simple and exploitable solutions for the daily activities of our users, our markets, and our clients. To face the disjunction between the everyday and the future, to feed the disruption, it is essential to produce “synthesis” by working at different scales (territories, eco-systems, experimental fields, communities of local actors) to try to establish a new global coherence. In this sense, making an artificial object “simplex” is a “complex engineering process consisting in making a powerful set of functionalities simple and pure. Indeed, a simplex is a complex object whose complexity has been deconstructed and which can be explained in a simple way” (Edgard Morin).

Our ambition is therefore clearly defined by this duality: to feed off the everyday and embrace simplicity!