This semester, I’ll be teaching Media Fluency for the Digital Age and shadowing the Introduction to Mass Communication class, which has 400 students. It also means that I’ll be returning to blogging, as well as teaching students about it.

It is exciting to be back here. When I moved to New York in 1995 and then onward to all the places I’ve lived, I never expected that I would come back to Madison, let alone to be on the faculty of this university. To make things even more poignant, my parents went here as well. Coming here again closes a loop in my life, completes a phase or two and starts another. I’m delighted, I’m excited, I’m excited.

If you’re not familiar with it, it’s a wonderful podcast by Roman Mars, with help from Sam Greenspan on architecture and design. It became the most funded journalism Kickstarter project ever a few months ago (2nd in publishing).

Want to know more about pneumatic post? Read my article in Cabinet, “Interfaces to the Subterranean” from summer 2011.  

Roman and I met 2 years ago in San Francisco on Parking Day in San Francisco in a tiny tent outside of Ritual Roasters. He told me about the show then, and two years later… it really is a series of tubes. He and Sam are so very talented, and it’s a big deal to be on the show. Pneu. Ma. Tique! Swoosh.

When I explain to people where I’m going next, they ask, how do you go from architecture to journalism and communication? The fact is, my work has always been about the materiality of communication and information. My dissertation is about how architecture materialized information in the 60s and 70s in the work of Nicholas Negroponte, Cedric Price and Christopher Alexander, but my research on pneumatic tubes and postal services deals with the same thing.

So now I’m back in Umeå, Sweden as a visiting researcher and guest of the HUMLab—the same people I visited last year. The Ume River flows by outside the Arts Campus, the days grow longer, the air grows more blustery each day. I’m finishing my dissertation, arguing with my arguments and developing some courses for the new school year.

1. Becoming fluent in German

2. Becoming fluent in other languages (French, Dutch, Italian), though I don’t maintain them

3. Living many places that weren’t home, not at first, on three continents

4. Listening to independent music

5. Doing radio

6. Writing about music

7. Becoming someone who can go running

8. Falling in love with communication technologies of all kinds

9. Identifying with terriers

10. Falling in love

11. Falling in love in a foreign language

12. Learning to play classical guitar and flute, even if I don’t really play now

13. Doing theater as a kid

14. Doing things where I’m not the best in the room

15. Teaching

16. Going back to school

17. Writing

18. Playing in a youth symphony and hearing what music sounds like when it floats in the air before setting onto the audience

19. Going to weddings, showers, reunions and funerals, even when they’re far

20. Singing at the top of my lungs in public

21. Going to Burning Man, and then not

22. Going to South by Southwest for 14 years, with # 15 coming up.

23. Living in San Francisco

24. Studying things I’m not good at

25. Studying things I couldn’t learn on my own

26. Studying things I am good at

27. Being mentored

28. Mentoring

29. Having friends much younger, much older and about the same age as me

30. Using online community, the web, social media for 20 years this year

31. Dancing, often not well

32. Studying architecture

33. Teaching design

34. Handing in my undergraduate thesis

35. Meeting you (my friends)

36. Walking around Barcelona with a digital camera in 2000, to teach myself how to see small details

37. My family

38. Books and reading

39. Always noticing the quality of light

40. Flirting

Above: a beautiful and violent sunrise at 8:15 am (the picture was taken from my bed!). No snow yet, which is rare, but the light is really something—that is, until the sun sets at 2:30 in the afternoon.

For the last three weeks, I’ve been a visiting researcher at the HUMLab digital humanities lab at Umeå University in Sweden. The community here is wonderful: a great group of postdocs, researchers and happy geeks of different stripes, all exploring technology and digital strategies in their work. How does an anthropologist model a site and its spatial relations? How do we create ideas of futures in literature, text and image? How does religious practice play out in the digital world? It’s been a fascinating set of discussions and scholars to meet and I’ve liked how it’s stretching my brain. I’ve given three lectures since I arrived: in the QUMU lecture series on qualitative methods, in a cognitive psychology class, and my first weekend, as a part of the Umeå Institute of Design Fall Summit (which I wrote about earlier). It’s been great to connect with students at the design school, too: I’ve spent a lot of time with Adam Henriksson, Lorenzo Davoli and look forward to our future exchanges. I feel sad to be leaving so soon.

Um, and I turned 40. 40, it turns out, is awesome. They don’t tell you this when you’re 30 and I think it’s because if we all knew that it was awesome, we’d adjust our ages upward.

My final week here will be even busier, as we host the Critically Making the Internet of Things conference. I’m giving a short talk on pneumatic tubes, moderating a virtual and live discussion with Anthony Townsend, Haiyan Zhang and Liz Goodman participating from afar, and hosting a workshop called Future Things with HUMLab postdoc Mike Frangos. I’m really looking forward to seeing friends like Bruce Sterling, Jasmina Tesonovic, Anne Galloway (double yay: I miss Anne a lot) and Kathleen Fitzpatrick, and seeing their reaction to Umeå in the winter.  In addition, I’m doing lots of writing writing writing, wrapping up two chapters of the dissertation and finessing another, preparing for job talks in the US, and putting together ideas for classes I’d like to teach.

Hard to imagine that in one week, I’ll return to the States, soak in LA’s sunlight as we hit end-of-term reviews at Art Center for our Graduate Media Design students, a visit to San Francisco, and visits to Madison and then Minneapolis for the family. In 2012? I think I’m staying put.

Left, age 29. Right, age 39.

Today, I am 39. Tomorrow, I will be 40. 

A decade ago, I was miserable. I had just met people who would become dear friends (Louisa, Tom) in Chicago and who I still adore, but didn’t know them well yet. I’d been laid off twice in a year. My boyfriend and I had an acrimonious breakup. I’d just bought a condo and it was beautiful but I couldn’t unpack. By July 2002, I gave up and moved back to San Francisco. I thought I’d return to the dotcom and web world of my 20s and my old friends.

But that’s where everything began to change. Three days after arriving in SF, Judy Wert and Nathan Shedroff started recruiting me for a professorship at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea in Italy, and right after I turned 31, I found out I got the job.

In my 30s, I…

spent most of my 30s in and around design and architecture schools. I was a professor at Ivrea, a master’s student at Yale and a PhD student at Princeton. Ten years ago, I never would have imagined that I would have gone back to school, let alone at an Ivy League institution. I probably wouldn’t have imagined that I’d be a design professor. I really probably wouldn’t have imagined I’d become an architectural historian or an historian of cybernetics and artificial intelligence.

started teaching. I love teaching and even more than that, I love advising students on their projects.

lived in Chicago, Italy, San Francisco, New Haven, Princeton and Los Angeles. I have lived for a month or more in Copenhagen, Bangalore, Berlin, Montreal and now, Umeå, Sweden.

loved a lot.

met wonderful people, stayed in touch with old friends, found my way back to people who mattered dearly, and yet still miss people I’ve lost so much.

ended up in places I never would have guessed.

Tomorrow, I will be 40. I…

don’t own a home, I’m not married, I don’t have children, I don’t have a dog. Thinking that all of those things will change in the next few years.

have friends as young as 20 and as old as their 70s. I love navigating the things we have in common across our ages. I’m friends with people I loved more than I can possibly explain. I’m friends with generous people and new people and people I do projects with and people who visit and people who invite me to wonderful places and people I admire. Lots of people I admire.

will finish a dissertation and then I’ll become a professor, if things go the way I hope they will.

still love music and am better clued in thanks to my hipper friends.

don’t plan to go skydiving because I prefer the view from the plane and scuba diving to the thought of hurtling through the air.

don’t have a bucket list and don’t know that I want one. Life’s good enough, the way it’s unfolding.

I’ll report back from 40 but in the meantime: thank you, 30s, for being so weird and surprising. Nothing went the way I would have expected when I was 29, but it’s so much better than what I could have imagined. I’m thankful, I’m amused, I’m happy.

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.

Give our op-ed a read and let us know what you think.

I couldn’t be more excited about this: this is my article, “Interfaces to the Subterranean,” in the latest issue of Cabinet! I’m delighted to have finally published an article about the Poste Pneumatique — and at that, in one of my very favorite publications. Please do pick up a copy: Cabinet is wonderful. It’s the Infrastructure issue.

A week ago tomorrow, I arrived in San Francisco, where I’m spending a month. I’m catsitting and writing the first of a few dissertation chapters about Nicholas Negroponte. Tonight, libations and introductions with the Overlap conference folks: tomorrow, we are off to Santa Cruz for the conference. I’m looking forward to conversations and connections and stories with the people there. It’ll be great to attend.

Otherwise, SF is its usual blur of friends new and old. I’m appreciating the conversations and connections, the small worldedness of it all, the wall of fog about to envelope the Mission, the cats that meow at me in the mornings, the tapping of my fingers on the keyboard.