Who’s Who

Building_Space_with_Words Blog Contributors

Yasmine Abbas, a French DPLG architect

Yasmine holds a Master of Science in Architecture Studies (SMArchS 2001) from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Doctor of Design (DDes 2006) from Harvard University Graduate School of Design. At Harvard she focused on how neo-nomads, digitally geared people on the move, reclaim a sense of belonging to places in the age of multiple mobilities - mental, physical and digital. She is the Founding Director of PanUrbanIntelligence, an international and multidisciplinary research, strategy and design consultancy that assists businesses, governments, and other agencies involved with cities to innovate and improve the built environment, i.e. prosper responsibly.
http://blog.neo-nomad.net/

Leslie Alfin, a Brooklyn based installation artist

Leslie investigates the paradoxical juxtopositions, contextual mutations, and transformations in meaning relevant to information that moves back and forth between virtual and physical space. Leslie teaches Innovation, Design, Sensational Failure and SeniorThesis in the Design & Management department at Parsons School of Design. Formerly, Leslie was the CEO of EGG, Inc., a marketing communications company and more recently, the Vice President of Marketing for the Enterprise Data Division of Cingular Wireless where she was responsible for the strategic oversight of the Blackberry product line.

Bojan Angelov, Doctoral Student in Technology Management, NYU-Poly

His research focuses on services innovation and competitive strategy, disruptive technologies and innovation, emerging technologies, and global innovation strategy. Bojan holds a Master Degree in Electrical Engineering and a Master Degree in Management from Polytechnic University, New York. Prior to coming to New York, he lived in Skopje, Macedonia, where he earned a Bachelors Degree in Electrical Engineering.Beyond his thesis topic, Bojan often wonders about time and space, reluctantly digging out Parmenides’s views on timelessness. Finding something worth talking about in every little thing that surrounds him, he often grabs on to a quote from Milcho Manchevski’s masterpiece Before the Rain (1994): “Time never dies, and the circle is not round, either.” Bojan is also very much interested in media and technology and regularly attends Meet Up Meetings on these topics.

Paola Antonelli, Senior Curator, Department of Architecture and Design, MOMA

Paola joined The Museum of Modern Art in February 1994 and is Senior Curator in the Department of Architecture and Design. Her first exhibition for MoMA, Mutant Materials in Contemporary Design (1995), was followed by several others, covering all facets of architecture and design in the contemporary world. Her most recent exhibition, Design and the Elastic Mind (2/24-5/12/2008), was devoted to the relationship between design and science. Paola Antonelli’s goal is to insistently promote design’s understanding, until its positive influence on the world is fully acknowledged and exploited. She is currently working on several shows on contemporary design; on Design Bites, a book about foods from all over the world appreciated as examples of outstanding design; and on trying to get a Boeing 747 into the collection of The Museum of Modern Art.

Rachel Barnard, an Australian architect
Rachel is an Australian architect whose practice has seen her based in New Delhi and New York.  Her work is located at the intersection of
new media, ubiquitous technologies, physical and social space.  Her installation work includes [V3] an outdoor moving image room
constructed from diffusion cloth, so visitors could see the images from within the room as a spatial experience and from outside as a
glowing object in space.
Claudia Conduto, International Multimedia Artist

Claudia is an artist working with painting, installation and photography. Her interest has been to question the relationship between perception/function and the way people and objects interact with space. She has been part of several group and individual exhibitions in Portugal, Singapore and in Brussels.Currently, she is involved in two projects. The first, moradia 361, is an artistic exploration of a house in Lisbon, Portugal, and the presence of those that inhabited it. The first stage included an installation and a series of photographs, displayed together in an individual exhibition that took place in Lisbon, in October 2007. The second stage integrated a series of photographs, which were part of a recent exhibition in October 2008.The second project is an itinerant group exhibition, with four other artists from around the world, titled Mobilizus. The art works explore the theme of TRANSGLOBAL MOBILITY, capturing the essence that binds together the lives of those that travel the world but are always home. The exhibition had its premier in Singapore in May 2008, and will travel the world following each artist to the countries where they are currently living.http://www.claudiaconduto.com/

John Baldachino, Associate Professor of Art and Art Education, Teachers College, Columbia University.
www.tc.columbia.edu/faculty/about.htm?facid=jb2445

Katie Dixon, Director of Planning and Development, Arts and Culture, Downtown Brooklyn Partnership
http://www.dbpartnership.org/about/staff

Jacqueline Donachie, International Artist

Jacqueline is one of Scotland’s most respected contemporary artists, graduating from The Glasgow School of Art’s influential Environmental Art department, which encouraged artists to place their work in a variety of public contexts out-with the gallery space. One of a group of artists who helped establish Glasgow in the 1990s as one of the world’s most dynamic contemporary art communities, she is still based in the city and has forged an international reputation for a socially-engaged art practice, with a special interest in healthcare and bio-medical research. Donachie is currently lead artist for Inverness’ new Centre for Health Science, creating a unique working environment by integrating art works into every aspect of the design of the building including landscaping, sign-posting, lighting and fabrics.

Recent Selected Solo Exhibitions:
2006: Tomorrow Belongs to Me, Hunterian Museum, Glasgow with Prof Darren Monckton;
2004: Green Place, Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester (Commission/purchase by the Contemporary Art Society);
2003: A Walk for Greville Verney, Compton Verney, Warwickshire (cat); 2002:Jacqueline Donachie, i-n-k, Copenhagen Dear Wives, IASPIS Gallery, Stockholm Three Pinkston Drive, FRAC Languedoc Roussilon, Montpellier, France (cat);
2001: South, Henry Moore Fellowship Exhibition, Spike Island, Bristol The House of Fun, Hal, Antwerpen Edinburgh Society, Round Room, Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh (cat);
2000: In the Arms of Strangers, City Art Gallery, Leeds

Recent Selected Group Exhibitions:
2008: Talkin’ Loud and Saying Somethin’; Gothenburg Museum of Art, Gothenburg. (cat); Perspectives on Muscle Disease, Novas Gallery, London. 2004: Designer Bodies, Stills Gallery, Edinburgh.
2003: AIR 2003, Gallery @ Glenfiddich, Dufftown, Scotland.
2002: Travelogue, Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester New; Recent acquisitions, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh;
2001:Here and Now, Scottish Art 1990 - 2001, Dundee Contemporary Arts, Scotland Circles, Centre for Art and Media Technology, Karlsruhe, Germany. 2000: International Selection, Salon de Montrouge, Paris and Institute of Contemporary Art, Lisbon.

Recent Artists’ Books: 2004: Somewhere to Stand, Published by Talbot Rice Gallery/ Frac Languedoc Roussillon, Edition of 1500. 2002: DM, Published by the University of Glasgow. Edition of 1,500.

http://www.elia-artschools.org/biennial/exhibition/index
http://www.artandresearch.org.uk/v1n1/donachie.html
Anne-Laure Fayard, Assistant Professor of Management, Department of Technology Management, NYU-Poly

Prior to moving to New York, she was a faculty member at INSEAD, both in Singapore and in Fontainebleau. Her research interests involve socio-material practices, organizational discourse, communication in online communities and virtual teams, space and organizational culture. She uses ethnography and qualitative methods in her research. She aims in her work to use theories from different disciplines - such as philosophy, psychology, sociology, communication - as she believes that exploring different viewpoints allows us to develop rich interpretations and novel understandings.Her research has been published in several leading journals such as Organization Studies, the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication and The European Management Journal. She earned a BA and an MA in Philosophy from Paris - La Sorbonne, an MA in Cognitive Science from Ecole Polytechnique (Paris) and a Ph.D. in Cognitive Science from the Ecole des Hautes-Etudes en Sciences Sociales (Paris).
http://www.bazartropicando.com/alfwebsite/index.html

Maciej Fiszer, visual artist, stage designer and scenographer

After studying and practicing Yatch and Boat Design in the UK, Maciej received a grant from the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw (Poland), in scenography. In 1995, he open his studio and developed different projects - installations, sculptures and scenographies for theatre and dance performances. Moreover, since 2006, he’s a scenographer at Centre George Pompidou, Museum of Modern Art in Paris

Selected works:

Installations: Close to You (Sidney, 2001), Little Waterstones (Guilin, China, 2004), Canaris (Cité des Sciences et de l’Industrie, Paris 2006)
Theatre and dance:
Le Naufrage du Titanic by H.M Enzensberger, directed by P.A Chapuis, Cloître des Carmes/Festival d’Avignon, July 1996;
Appartement témoin: set and installation, Martial Chazalon anthropologist and Martin Chapus Choreographer ( Montreal, April 2005)
Others: Consultant for Reichen et Robert architects, landscape project for the Pier 40 , New-York
More: http://fiszer.free.fr/

Laura Forlano, Kauffman Fellow in Law at the Information Society Project at Yale Law School.

Laura’s dissertation, “When Code Meets Place: Collaboration and Innovation at WiFi Hotspots,” explores the intersection between organizations, technology (in particular, mobile and wireless technology) and the role of place in communication, collaboration and innovation. Forlano is an Adjunct Faculty member in the Design and Management department at Parsons and the Graduate Programs in International Affairs and Media Studies at The New School. She serves as a board member of NYCwireless and the New York City Computer Human Interaction Association. Forlano received a Ph.D. in Communications and a Master’s in International Affairs from Columbia University, a Diploma in International Relations from The Johns Hopkins University and a Bachelor’s in Asian Studies from Skidmore College.

Austin Henderson, Director of Knowledge Management, Advanced Concepts & Technology Group, Pitney Bowes

Austin has been in the field of Human-Computer Interaction since 1964. He has a B.Sc. in Mathematics from Queen’s University, Canada, an MS in Computer Science from the University of Illinois, and a Ph.D in Computer Science for MIT. He has built applications in areas including manufacturing, air traffic control, electronic mail (Hermes), user interface design tools (Trillium), workspace management (Rooms, Buttons). He has done research and user interface architecture with Xerox at both PARC and EuroPARC, Apple Computer, and Pitney Bowes and industrial design with Fitch, and research consulting with his own firm, Rivendel Consulting. Currently he is Director of Knowledge Management in the Advanced Concepts & Technology group of Pitney Bowes in Shelton CT, USA. Professionally, Austin has been active in ACM/SIGCHI since 1983, including as conference chair (1985), and organization chair (1989-1993). His research interests are in the areas of the design of systems that can be collaboratively evolved by users, and in the management of the integration of research and development in corporations.
Mark Hansen, Associate Professor of Statistics, UCLA
http://www.stat.ucla.edu/~cocteau/

Katherine Isbister, Associate Professor of Digital Media, NYU-Poly

Katherine also maintains an affiliation at the ITU Copenhagen Center for Computer Games Research. Current research include emotion and gesture in games, supple interactions, design of game characters and game usability. http://www.katherineinterface.com/

Natalie Jereminjenko, Associate Professor of Visual Art, Steinhardt School of New York University & Director of xdesign Environmental Health Clinic
http://xdesign.nyu.edu

http://steinhardt.nyu.edu/faculty_bios/view/Natalie_Jeremijenko

Lucy Kimbell, Clark Fellow in Design Leadership, Said Business School, Oxford University

Lucy works as an artist, interaction designer and researcher. Her recent work disturbs evaluation cultures in management, technology and the arts. Before joining the faculty at Said Business School at the University of Oxford as Clark Fellow in Design Leadership, Lucy was an Arts and Humanities Research Council creative and performing arts research fellow at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art and a tutor on the MA Interaction Design at the Royal College of Art, London. In addition to making art Lucy has over 10 years experience as a technology innovation consultant and design manager and previously worked as a BBC radio journalist and night club promoter. Her projects include Personal Political Indices (Pindices), 2005, a collaboration with sociologist Andrew Barry that was part of Making Things Public at ZKM, Karlsruhe, 2005, curated by Latour and Weibel. Her Rat Fair was held at Camden Arts Centre, London, in 2005. In 2008 Lucy organized an exhibition entitled Imagining Business at Said Business School in collaboration with Nina Wakeford and Alex Hodby.
Blog http://www.designleadership.blogspot.com/
Website http://www.lucykimbell.com
Faculty page http://www.sbs.ox.ac.uk/faculty/Kimbell+Lucy/Kimbell+Lucy.htm

Bruno Latour, French sociologist of science, anthropologist and an influential theorist

Bruno Latour born in 1947 in Beaune, Burgundy, from a wine grower family, was trained first as a philosopher and then an anthropologist. From 1982 to 2006, he has been professor at the Centre de sociologie de l’Innovation at the Ecole nationale supérieure des mines in Paris and, for various periods, visiting professor at UCSD, at the London School of Economics and in the history of science department of Harvard University.He is now professor at Sciences Po Paris associated with the Centre de sociologie des organisations where heis also the vice-president for research of that school.After field studies in Africa and California he specialized in the analysis of scientists and engineers at work. In addition to work in philosophy, history, sociology and anthropology of science, he has collaborated into many studies in science policy and research management. He has written Laboratory Life (Princeton University Press), Science in Action and The Pasteurization of France. He also published a field study on an automatic subway system Aramis or the love of Technology and an essay on symmetric anthropology We have never been modern. He has also gathered a series of essays, Pandora’s Hope:Essays in the Reality of Science Studie to explore the consequences of the ” science wars”. After having directed several thesis on various environmental crisis, he published a book on the political philosophy of the environment Politics of Nature (all of those books are with Harvard University Press and have been translated in many languages).

In a series of books in French he has been exploring the consequences of science studies on different traditional topics of the social sciences: religion in Sur le culte moderne des dieux fetiches, and Jubiler ou Les tourments de la parole religieuse, and social theory in Paris ville invisible, a photographic essay on the technical & social aspects of the city of Paris (now available on the web in English Paris Invisible City). After a long field work on one of the French supreme Courts, he has recently published a monograph la Fabrique du droit-une ethnographie du Conseil d’Etat (to be published in English). A new presentation of the social theory, which he has developed with his colleagues in Paris, is available at Oxford University Press, under the title: Theory. After having curated a major international exhibition in Karlsruhe at the ZKM center, Iconoclash beyond the image wars in science, religion and art, he has curated another one also with Peter Weibel Making Things Public: The atmospheres of democracy which has closed in October 2005 (both catalogues are with MIT Press).
http://www.bruno-latour.fr/

Ruth Maclennan, multimedia artist

Ruth’s works includes video installations, bookworks, drawings, live events, and curatorial projects. Her works show the performance of power relations and explore the collision of perspectives-in front of the camera, within social and physical architecture, and through the behavior of the camera itself. Maclennan’s current project Polytechnical Institute for the Study of the Expanding Field of Radical Urban Life, investigates site through writing, performance and events in the city (see www.archwaypolytechnic.org).

Her work is shown internationally in exhibitions and film festivals. These include Central Asian Project, Cornerhouse, Manchester, and Space, London; New York Underground Film Festival; Second International Artists’ Airshow, Arts Catalyst; Medicine Now, Wellcome Collection; The Body. The Ruin, Ian Potter Museum, Melbourne; State of Mind, London School of Economics (artist and curator). Artists’ books include, Re: the archive, the image, and the very dead sheep with Uriel Orlow (London, Double agents: 2004), and Style/Substance-The MaxMara Coat Project with Volker Eichelmann (MaxMara, 1999).

Shannon Mattern, Assistant Professor and Director of Graduate Studies, Department of Media Studies and Film, The New School

Shannon’s teaching and research focus on relationships among media, architecture, and urban planning. Her book, The New Downtown Library: Designing With Communities, was published in 2007 by University of Minnesota Press. She is Assistant Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Media Studies and Film at The New School. www.wordsinspace.net

Anca Metiu, Associate Professor at ESSEC Business School.

Anca’s research centers on issues related to workplace interactions and social dymanics between groups, with the objective of explaining why groups cooperate, and the processes of effective cooperation. She examines these problems primarily via ethnographic methods. She earned a Ph.D. in Management from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, an MBA from the University at Urbana-Champaign and a BA in Law and Economics from the University of Sibiu.
See http://www45.essec.edu/faculty/anca-metiu#

Milena Nuti, interdisciplinary researcher

Milena’s interests include cognitive science, philosophy of psychology, linguistics and theories of communication, information design and social policy. She gained her PhD in 2003 from University College London with a thesis on the scientific study of commonsense understanding. Since 2004 she has been affiliated to the School of Philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London. Ongoing research themes include: relations between intuitive, reflective and cultural common sense; clashes between common sense and science; the impact on legislation and policy of implicitly held but mistaken commonsense views about human behavior.In 2007-2008 Milena was Editor of Trends in Cognitive Sciences. She is currently working on a research project examining the role of intuition in philosophical and psychological theorizing.

Cliff Oswick, Professor of Organization Theory and Discourse, School of Business and Management at Queen Mary, University of London
Cliff Oswick’s research interests focus on the application of aspects of discourse, dramaturgy, tropes, narrative and rhetoric to the study of management. Most recently, this has involved the analysis of: the role of metaphor in knowledge generation; globalisation as a form of trope; the discourse(s) of consumption; boundary objects as discursive phenomena; dialogical perspectives on organisational learning; and the social construction of identity.
http://www.busman.qmul.ac.uk/staff/staff.php?uid=206

Ben Rubin, Media Artist
www.earstudio.com/benRubin/benRubin.html

Graeme Sullivan, Associate Professor of Art Education, Teachers College, Columbia University
www.tc.columbia.edu/faculty/index.htm?facid=gs354

Camille Utterback, pioneering artist and programmer in the field of interactive installation.
www.camilleutterback.com/bio.html

David Walczyk, Assistant at the Pratt Institute Graduate School of Information and Library Science

Prior to joining Pratt, David was a Fellow at the Computer Science and Telecommunication Board of the United States National Academy of Sciences in Washington D.C., a visiting scholar to the Library of Congress, a Brand Strategist on Madison Avenue, and an Engineer at General Electric Global Research and Development. David completed his doctorate in Media Ecology and Interaction Design at Columbia University and his undergraduate in Computer Science at the College of Saint Rose. His teaching and research is through the Pratt Cultural Informatics Lab and is focused on human-centered design, physical computing, and information architecture / interaction design. Specifically, their relationship to ubiquitous media and cultural information. Summarized as the media ecology of cultural information and the media ecology of collective consciousness. His major theoretical influences are Carl Jung, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Marshall McLuhan.
http://mysite.pratt.edu/~dwalczyk/

John Weeks, Professor of Leadership and Organizational Behavior, IMD (Switzerland)

John specializes in issues of organizational culture, leadership and change. He is particularly interested in how organizational culture evolve, and how effective leadership is shaped by culture while at the same time changing the culture. His book, Unpopular Culture, is an ethnographic study of a British bank where everyone, from the CEO to the most junior clerk, complains about the organizational culture even as they go on reproducing it through their actions and words and, ironically, through the very way they complain about it. This research, and the book itself, have received coverage in mainstream media outlets such as The Financial Times, The Economist, BBC Radio4, The Guardian, The Boston Globe and The Times Higher Education Supplement, as well as in academic journals such as Administrative Science Quarterly, American Journal of Sociology, and Contemporary Sociology. John Weeks’s most recent work is a set of theoretical and empirical studies about how culture and institutions evolve in organizations. His academic writing has appeared in Academy of Management Review, Human Relations, Journal of Organizational Behavior and Organization Studies. His practitioner-oriented work has been published in the Financial Times, Harvard Business Review, The Spectator, World Business,and Academy of Management Learning and Education. Before joining IMD, John Weeks spent 11 years at INSEAD (France). He holds a PhD in Management from the MIT Sloan School of Management (USA) an MPhil in Management from Oxford University (UK), and a BA in Computer Science from the University of California Berkeley (USA).

Aileen Wilson, Associate Professor, Art and Design Education, Pratt Institute.

Aileen received a B.A. (Hons) Printmaking/Painting First Class Honors from Gray’s School of Art, Aberdeen, Scotland, an M.A. Printmaking, Chelsea School of Art, London, UK and an Ed. M. Art/Art Education, Teacher’s College, Columbia University, New York City. Wilson is currently a student in the doctoral program in Art/Art Education at Teacher’s College, Columbia University. Her research looks at drawings by adolescents and the role of violent content in their work. Her involvement in Building Space With Words grew from an interest in the role of online communities in education and in visualizing research design in art education. She will be on sabbatical from Pratt in Spring 2009, working on Building Space with Words and on her doctoral research.

Stephen Woolgar, Chair of Marketing at the Saïd Business School, University of Oxford

Woolgar has published widely in social studies of science and technology, social problems and social theory. His research interests are: Social studies of science and technology; Social implications of electronic technologies; Technologies of representation and (especially visual) evidence; Governance and accountability relations; Mundane technologies; and Social theory

http://www.sbs.ox.ac.uk/faculty/Woolgar+Steve/