Space and Culture

Once a week for the next month or so, readers can expect to see updates and announcements from the journal editors and our bloggers—and as Web Editor, I thought I should get us started.

First, I’m very excited to announce that in November I take up a new permanent position as Senior Lecturer in Design Research at the School of Design, Victoria University of Wellington. Besides being super excited about moving to New Zealand, I’m proud to be joining such impressive colleagues and students doing world-class work. I’m also really looking forward to learning, and blogging, more about the spaces and cultures of the southern hemisphere!

Although I’m feeling quite spoiled knowing that I’ll get two summers this year, I imagine teaching in the new Culture+Context degree programme will offer plenty of challenges, as well as  opportunities. I’ll be developing courses in design+culture and design anthropology, as well as co-teaching a design research class, which will no doubt help me make new connections between sociality, spatiality and materiality. I’m also working to establish the Design Culture Laboratory and starting my new research project, Counting Sheep: Using RFID to Explore NZ Wool Industries.

In other news, I’ve been collaborating with the Touch project, led by Timo Arnall and based in the Interaction Design department of the Oslo School of Architecture and Design. The project explores NFC and RFID technologies to enable people to interact with everyday objects and situations through their mobile devices. Earlier this year I completed re/touch, a website that “brings together hundreds of cross-cultural examples of social norms and values involving touch to help designers and researchers create design briefs, refine interaction scenarios, define game play or otherwise get inspired to think, make and do things touch-related.” The Oslo super-team designed an interactive exhibition for re/touch that showed at Nordes 09 a couple of weeks ago, so keep an eye on the project blog for more on that. My current work involves a material culture analysis of the project’s RFID objects collection.

Long-time readers may also remember me from my research blog, purse lip square jaw. I’ve just started blogging again after a year or so hiatus, and I hope you’ll visit me there too.

Over the next week, I’ll be posting some new book reviews here—as well as a call for reviewers and online book review guidelines. I hope you’ll join the conversations!