Alexia Bhéreur-Lagounaris

Alexia Bhéreur-Lagounaris

Alexia Bhéreur-Lagounaris has a multidisciplinary professional background that includes music, writing, dance and choreography before becoming an event creator and a game designer.

Trained at Montreal’s contemporary dance school, she performed for many productions, was an Art Scout for Cirque du Soleil, a creative director, scriptwriter for Radio-Canada, Wasabi, Lalala Human Steps and event creator for Québec Cinéma. She’s also a research geek Wizard at INRS (Institut national de la recherche scientifique) and her expertise in human-centric design is used in all her projects where collaboration and collective intelligence is enhance. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in interactive multimedia communication from UQAM and a master’s degree M.Sc. A. in games with a social impact from University of Montréal. In 2016, she founded her game events productions with ABLBLALAB, and creates social games, gives workshops, coaching and conferences.


WARNING: Not suitable for robots

Keynote,  Saturday, 19th October, 10:30 – 11:30

In her 2018 thesis: « Games with a social impact: towards a new name for a Responsible entertainment » Alexia Bhéreur-Lagounaris concludes that the future of game design innovation needs a change of axis from the “game object” to “human subject playing”. But in order to bring to life the shift from object to subject, she concludes that human-centric design, means designing with and for the whole body. But what does it change to design for the whole body and what does it imply? After all, being human means to have a body, no?!

And this is where the plot twist takes place.

From piece of evidence of neuroscience recent research to philosophical work written in 1637, we put on the stand our system of beliefs and values about our body. We struck a deal with the responsible and finalize the investigation on why on earth we have been so trap sitting, in the “techno power trio” world (brain+eyes+finger tips). Surprise! The recent discoveries tells us that we think with our body. That Descartes made a mistake by separating thoughts and actions. And that our gut and heart have intelligence that we’ve been underusing. Ready to design, move and play mix realities on our feet?

In this conference:
We revisit the importance of designing-imagining-playing-feeling in holistic ways not just for the fun of it, but for our bio-psycho-social health stakes. We will take engaging examples from LARP, Augmented reality and physical games.
WARNING:
-Suitable for dopamine, serotonin, endorphin & oxytocin hormones.
-Not suitable for robots.

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