Stuff I thought about recently
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For the Love of Reading
‘For though reading seems so simple—a mere matter of knowing the alphabet—it is indeed so difficult that it is doubtful whether anybody knows anything about it.’ Virginia Woolf We often seem to think reading is a simple thing, if not downright banal. We pretend that if we know the letters, if we speak the language,…
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What is a Career Anyway?
Ever since I finished my MA in Media Studies, 16 years ago (!), I have resisted the idea of having or pursuing a career. I have merely been playing a lot, messing around, doing stuff I found exciting and potentially helpful, but I never thought about any of that as constituting a ‘career’. It somehow…
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Small Wonders
I remember reading this claim about Bowie that his life was a ‘rebuke to cynicism’ and isn’t that just the most beautiful thing? I am certainly no stranger to the sarcasm, cynicism, bitterness, envy and general sense of despair that haunts us all. It is so easy to give in to, to be swept away…
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Playing with playfulness
For many years, I have been pondering the relationship between ‘play’ and ‘playfulness’. I have come to believe that the very possibility of distinguishing between play and playfulness has been vastly overstated. The more I think about it, the less sense it makes to view them as separate entities. They are perhaps more like units…
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Embracing Vulnerability
I was wandering and so were my thoughts, slowly following an all but invisible path through the forest, when I saw a duck take flight from a small pond. I paused for a moment, following its trajectory across the sky, before I sat down on a tree stump, surrounded by birds chirping. Most of my…
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PhD defence materials
On April 9th 2024, I had my PhD ‘defence’ (which I insisted was not actually a defence, but more like a ‘campfire conversation’), where I presented my PhD project, ‘The Junk Playground as Agora: Designing for Playful Democratic Frictions’, to the committee and all the lovely people in the room. It was an intense, but…
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After the PhD Defence
Wow. These days, after my defence-not-a-defence on April 9th, I’m exhausted, hardly hanging together, but also deeply, profoundly grateful. Grateful for the opportunity to pursue this wild, unpredictable passion project; grateful for the generous support along the way; grateful for the careful reading by the committee, and not least grateful for all the incredible people…
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Recovering from the PhD
It’s been a few weeks (well, more like a month, if we’re counting) since I handed in my PhD thesis at Design School Kolding. The final title is this: The Junk Playground as Agora: Designing for Playful Democratic Frictions The very careful observer may notice that it changed a little from my long-standing working title,…
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I cry, I hope
Over the past years, I have become increasingly attentive to my own affective responses to things, all things, every thing. I am in the world, flesh and all, something happens, and I am moved, affected. I don’t know quite how to talk about this (affect theory is still quite puzzling to me), but I try.…
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There Will Come Soft Rains
Just as the rain started to fall softly, almost cautiously, after a month of warm, dry weather, I stumbled upon a poem by Sara Teasdale, “There Will Come Soft Rains” (thanks Rikke for sharing!), and while apparently it’s written at the end of WWI in 1918, it feels strikingly timely: There will come soft rains…