Lots of travel. Lots of projects. Lots of papers and writing. Lots of arguing with the structure of my dissertation. Lots of airplanes. Lots of mud and melting snow in Princeton, where I sit at my desk right now. It’s the quiet before the storm — I’ll post about what’s coming up in my next post!
Since I last posted, here are some places I’ve been.
Shanghai, China, October 2010
The Bund
Me in a cab under the blue-lit megastructure urban highways
Umeå, Sweden, December 2010 (brr!)
I was a guest at the HUMLab and spoke at the Media Places conference.
Munich (and also Düsseldorf, not pictured), Germany, December 2010
Glühwein with the lovely Magdalen Powers.
Venice, CA, off and on, October 2010–February 2011
Lifeguard houses on Christmas Day
There’s also been Minneapolis (twice to see family), New York (Microsoft Social Computing Symposium), Sacramento, San Francisco and Burbank (Institute for the Future).
I have a tendency to think I’m not getting enough done — probably because the dissertation writing is the hardest part– but I’ve been up to a bunch of things:
- I was invited to bat for the home team: I gave a paper called “To the first machine that can appreciate the gesture: Nicholas Negroponte and the Architecture Machine” at the Teaching Architecture Practicing Pedagogy conference at Princeton last weekend. Outstanding conference and great community of scholars and ideas on architecture practice and pedagogy. I also lectured on Negroponte as a guest speaker in a proseminar at Princeton in December.
- Working on a project I love at the Institute for the Future with two people I greatly admire, Anthony Townsend and Jake Dunagan. Lots of travel around California for fascinating conversations, workshops and interviews.
- Interviewing Nicholas Negroponte for publication in an upcoming book on the 150 year anniversary in the MIT School of Architecture. Was paid an embarrassingly high compliment from the man himself.
- Finishing a little project on communication systems for a future exhibition.
- Wrote a short piece in Rumor (Princeton School of Architecture publication) about the Shanghai workshop we conducted, Soft Energy Infrastructure
- Turned my fascination with and research on pneumatic tubes as an article for Cabinet
- Continue to advise master’s five students in the exciting Graduate Media Design Program at Art Center in Pasadena. It’s great to be a fly on the wall of their creative processes.
… and still trying to go running and do yoga here and there, to read self-help books and get decent sleep and cook good food. No wonder the blog ends up in last place!