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. An article that Karin Bradley and me wrote wrote quite some time ago, " The sharing economy as the commons of the 21st century ", has finally been published and is available online as well as as a pdf file  (nicer formatting) for free. It's published in the Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society , in a special issue on  Sharing Economies? Theories, practices and impacts  (edited by Anna Davies, Betsy Donald, Mia Gray and Janelle Knox-Hayes). It seems our article was published online 10 days ago, on Feb 18, but I only found out about it now, when a reference to the article was published by Google Scholar. I have (apparently, in some way) set up an alarm for when articles of mine are published/included in Google Scholar and learned about it through this mail: The special issue has a bunch of other articles that look interesting and that are available as advance copies online . I do however notice that our article is the only one that is available under an...

. Three years ago I went on a sabbatical to the US for six months and I'm planning to go on another sabbatical to Barcelona during the first half of 2018 ( which I have written about once before on the blog ). The largest crux of financing a sabbatical is my own salary. If I was willing to live for half a year without a salary, then I could go on a half-year long sabbaticals whenever I wanted to. Since I in fact have accumulated overtime (a lot), I have come to the conclusion that I can, without taking too much of a financial hit, go on six-month sabbatical to "catch up". I'm not sure my accumulated overtime will cover the whole six months though and there are also other (non-salary) costs associated with going away, e.g. increased costs of living when you live elsewhere temporarily. When we went to the US, it was for example absolutely necessary to have a car (for six months). In the end, it is of course better to go on a sabbatical and have better financial support...

. Me and a bunch of other people organized a workshop, HCI and UN's Sustainable Development Goals : Responsibilities, Barriers and Opportunities , at the NordiCHI conference back in October. It was a great workshop and we were approached already before the workshop was held by Carlo Giovanella, the editor in chief of an online peer-reviewed open-access journal, Interaction Design & Architecture(s) ( IxD&A ) about putting together a special issue on that topic - to which I agreed. Technically it's not going to be a "special issue" but rather a "focus session" and the difference is that a focus session has fewer articles than a special issue (3-5 instead of 6-9). Also, we would have had to wait another six months for a slot for a special issue. Giovanella characterized the journal’s focus as relating to 1) computer science, 2) social innovation, 3) design and 4) education. This all adds up to a general focus on “designing the future”. It also seems I...

. Me and a Daniel Svensson wrote and presented a paper, "21st century sports: Movements without movements" at a smaller, local cultural studies conference in Sweden a few years ago. The paper was the result of a side project and while we both really liked the paper, none of us have given enough time and attention to getting it published afterwards. I for one decided that the MULTI.PLAYER 2   games conference in Münster two and a half years ago was my last computer games conference and the other Daniel was busy writing his ph.d. thesis at the department of History of Science, Technology and Environment at the KTH School of Architecture and the Built Environment). He presented it just before Christmas and it's called “ Scientizing performance in endurance sports : The emergence of ‘rational training’ in cross-country skiing, 1930-1980” ( pdf available here ). So while we both liked the paper and thought it had potential, nothing came out of our wish to publish it either a...

. One of the two research projects I work in, " Sustainable practices and data : Design and opportunities for change " (SPOC) organized a Swedish-language 4-hour workshop/half-day seminar this past week on " The food, the environment and the worms : How do we design a better food system?". Which sounds better in Swedish due to the alliteration ("maten, miljön och maskarna"). While the project also involves ICT and design, the seminar focused more exclusively on food and sustainability and we had two great invited speakers, Gunnar Rundgren (farmer, author ) and Karin Wendin (professor). We also took the opportunity to present our research project (my colleague Cecilia Katzeff did that) while I was leading and hosting the event. See the invitation below for further information. I thought both talks were great but will only discuss Gunnar's talk here. He was the main speaker and he has just come out with a book (published in both  Swedish  and English),...

. I have complained about the distance between me and my students several times on this blog. Back in 2011 I wrote a text about " the student-teacher gap " and I followed it up with a 2012 text about " Bridging the distance between me and my students ". The latter text describes an experiment that later failed (but it hadn't and I didn't know it would fail at the time when I wrote the blog post). My conclusion back then was that the only students I really got to know and that I had a personal relationship with were the (few) students to whom I was their bachelor's or master's thesis advisor. These students I actually  did  know (some) and I could quite easily write a letter of recommendation for them. It was very hard to write such a letter to students who instead took one of my courses together with 50 or 60 other students. This was not very satisfying neither for me nor my/our students (I presume). It felt like we passed each other by on conveyor b...