….and she’s off.
My best friend, Jennifer Bove, is moving across the country. She’s joined Kicker Studio, a design consultancy that says, “We do interaction-infused product design for: consumer electronics / appliances / mobile devices /kiosks and touchscreens / interactive environments /robots / responsive objects.”
Jenn and I have known each other 16 years as of this month. We met as exchange students in Montpellier, where we became part of an inseparable trio with Brett Lund. Over most of the years I’ve known her, we haven’t lived in the same place: I was in San Francisco, she was in Washington DC and then New York. But other years, we’ve been much more proximate. When I was a professor at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea, Jenn was a student and we lived next door to each other. And for the last 3 years or so, she lived in New York and I lived in the next state over, so I saw her at least every two weeks if not more frequently.
I’ve never had a friend like Jenn. She’s the person with whom I feel the most comfortable. She’s brilliant and funny and friendly. She ran the Jennifer Bove Home for Wayward Girls, where I stayed frequently, in Carroll Gardens. I already miss her.
San Francisco, she’s all yours as of this weekend. In the meantime, she is chronicling her road trip on her website. Be good to her and make her fall in love with the city and with northern California, okay?