I’m Dr. Molly Wright Steenson.
I’m the President and CEO of the American Swedish Institute in Minneapolis, a nearly hundred year-old museum, mansion, and cultural center in Minneapolis that explores migration, identity, and belonging, and enduring cultural ties to Sweden. I’m also the Honorary Consul for Sweden for Minnesota and the upper Midwest.
Before coming to ASI, I spent 20 years in higher education including in university leadership and as a tenured faculty member. At Carnegie Mellon University, I was CMU’s Vice Provost for Faculty and Senior Associate Dean for Research in the College of Fine Arts. I was the inaugural K&L Gates Associate Professor of Ethics & Computational Technologies for my AI research, and an associate professor in the School of Design. Previously, I was at the University of Wisconsin-Madison as an assistant professor at the School of Journalism & Mass Communication. I hold a PhD in Architecture from Princeton University and a Master’s in Environmental Design from the Yale School of Architecture.
I serve on the board of the Swedish-American Chamber of Commerce in Minnesota, and the advisory boards of the Keller Center at Princeton University for Innovation in Engineering Education, the Glen Nelson Center at American Public Media, and the National Advisory Committee of Concordia Language Villages. I am a fellow at the Charles Babbage Institute at the University of Minnesota.
Museums transform by connecting people and ideas.
I lead a nearly 100-year-old museum and cultural center with deep meaning for our visitors. Our lens is Sweden and Swedish experience, which includes arts and culture, history, and human values, and looking stories of migration, identity and belonging. We partner with schools, museums, galleries, and social service organizations, especially in our neighborhood and its surroundings. ASI offers 450 unique programs and events a year, several exhibitions. We co-create and partner with museums, schools, and other cultural institutions in Minneapolis. We are home to the Honorary Consulate for Sweden and the King of Sweden is our royal patron.
I’ve been researching and writing about AI for 20 years.
AI is old—we’ve been using the term since 1955. That matters today when people tell us that AI is brand new. My book tells the radical history of AI in architecture and design. Architectural Intelligence: How Designers and Architects Created the Digital Landscape (MIT Press, 2017) is a deep dive into the history of AI in architecture and design. Architectural Intelligence has been translated into Simplified Chinese.
If the Bauhaus were around today, what would keep it up at night? For the 100th birthday of the Bauhaus, I co-edited of Bauhaus Futures (MIT Press, 2019) with Laura Forlano & Mike Ananny. The contributions include race, gender, social justice, emerging technology, speculative design, design education, and more.
technology & ethics…
AI ethics has exploded in the last several years. But what are we really talking about when we talk about ethics? Turns out that it’s often not ethics at all, which matters when we want to design and build technologies with consequence. I held the inaugural K&L Gates Associate Professorship in Ethics and Computational Technologies at Carnegie Mellon and lead the investigation of these questions in collaboration with researchers across the university and the world. I continue this work today, looking at the impact on museums, and especially seeking a Swedish lens for the work.
and pneumatic tubes.
Old infrastructures and interfaces like pneumatic tubes and reveal much about how we communicate today. Starting in the 19th century, there used to be pneumatic tube systems connecting post offices in more than 60 cities, on every continent except Antarctica. Paris had the largest network, the Poste Pneumatique, which operated till 1984.
My essay “A Series of Tubes” in the Missouri Review was longlisted in Best American Essays 2021. I’ve given talks about pneumatic tubes that went viral, and have written academic papers and beautiful essays on them, like this one in Cabinet.
I speak to audiences all over the world.
I keynote internationally. I’ve given hundreds of talks worldwide. I also advise & organize conferences. I was on the Advisory Board for SXSW Interactive from 1999–2015 and was the co-chair of the IxDA Interaction Awards from 2016–18.
I was one of the earliest user experience (UX) designers.
I cut my teeth on the World Wide Web in 1994 and was one of the first UX designers and content strategists. I built the first news-delivering website at Reuters in 1995, managed the second most-hit page on the Internet—the Netscape Search page—in 1996, worked on the earliest social media as an online community pioneer, and co-founded a groundbreaking pop culture feminist webzine, Maxi in 1999, and built complex digital platforms at companies like Scient and Razorfish in the late 90s and early 2000s. At the groundbreaking Interaction Design Institute Ivrea in Ivrea, Italy (where the Arduino board was invented), I was Associate Professor of Connected Communities.
The name of this site, Girlwonder.com, is a vestige from my early web days. It has been online for more than 30 years, since 1995, and as Girlwonder.com since 1997.
I am a mentor.
As a professor and researcher, I spent more than 20 years working with students and faculty both to envision big, exciting projects, and then mentor them in carrying them out. I’ve advised 40+ master’s theses and a dozen PhD students. My teaching has ranged from seminars to studios to 400-student lecture classes. In short, I help people to dream up and succeed at the biggest things they can imagine.