Hello again, Girlwonder! This missive reaches you from Sweden, where I’m on my way to Umeå. I’ll be spending a month here doing a fellowship with the HUMLab at the University of Umeå. Tomorrow, I’ll be speaking at the Umeå Institute of Design fall conference organized by Matt Cottam, along with Russell Davies, Dave Vondle and Matt Ward, and next month at the Critically Making the Internet of Things conference. It’s a delight to be back, to come a little bit earlier in the winter this time around… I came last year to Umeå to speak at the Media Places conference, which kicked off a friendship with Patrik Svensson, the head of the lab, and fomented the idea of delving into some digital humanities research here. Also, my family background is largely Scandinavian, with the Swedish branch of the family originating not far from Umeå: where no one will ever mistake me for Italian, everybody looks like me in Sweden.
There’s lots to catch you up on, much of which I’ll write about in the next few weeks. I spent the summer in San Francisco, writing my dissertation from a desk kindly provided by Adaptive Path, with a few intermittent weeks in Princeton for dissertation boot camp and summer barbecuing. We had a reunion for the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea in Italy in September, which I followed with a visit to Milan and London. The school year is rolling again at Art Center College of Design, and I’m teaching writing and advising thesis year students in the Graduate Media Design Program. And I turn 40 in 15 days, a milestone birthday that portends to be the start of an amazing decade. I will be in Sweden, maybe at the Treehotel, maybe in Berlin. And amidst the writing and movement, I’m applying for academic jobs.