I have been teaching in the media technology department at Södertörn University since 2015. Here I have mostly taken on an assisting role by conducting seminars and workshops. But occasionally I also take the lead in giving lectures as well as different hands-on labs and workshops as well as the additional correcting and grading. Additionally I have supervised 30+ students on bachelors level during their thesis work as well as their final exam projects. 

During the past five years I was recurrently involved in the following courses:

•  Innovation, creativity and design, 7,5 ects (preparation, lecturing, workshops, grading)
•  Interaction Design I and II (Media technology B), 30 ects (lecturing and seminars)
• Media technology research, 7,5 ects (lecturing and workshops)
•  Theory of Science (Media technology C), 30 ects (grading)
•  Theme week (coordination, organising speakers, workshops and lecturing for 200+ students)
•  Practical exams projects, 7,5 ects  (supervising)
•  Practical experience in industry, 7,5 ects (supervising)
•  Bachelor Thesis, 15 ects (supervising), here 22 students successfully defended so far
• UX Experience and Interactive Media Design & UX prototyping (Master course), 7,5 ects 
(seminars, lectures, workshops)

As part of my own preparation for teaching, I have successfully visited and taken a course on “Teaching for Higher Education” 7,5 ECTS. Additionally I have been involved with boards and committee work within the university at Södertörn.  

My thesis work revolves around the maker movement, experiences of ‘making’ in practice and the literacies and sensibilities when making use of technology in this domain. In the past five years I have been actively observing various maker initiatives in the Nordic countries. Making and its DIY practices, is a fascinating topic that challenges the boundaries between hobby-based activities, entrepreneurship and manufacturing processes. My thesis aims to critically examine and understand the value of makerspaces as a place that opens for creativity, self-expression and innovation. I explore how maker culture is reflected upon in academia (more specifically the HCI discourse), and the impact of maker practice for the wider society.

In various publications I have, together with collaborators, introduced concepts of 'material literacy' which contibutes to the discussion on the interplay between computational materials and experience, and 'machine sensibility' that highlights the embodied and situated dimensions of 3D printing. Theoretically, my work explores human technology relationships that are impacted by the material turn in HCI. Current activities involve papers that come to terms with maker practice and ultimately ‘kappa’ writing - that is - threading a consistent narrative and theoretical framing around this empirically driven, qualitative research endevour. 

A selection from Stockholm University publication database

• "It's a Bomb!" – Material Literacy and Narratives of Making

  2017. Sophie Landwehr Sydow, Jakob Tholander, Martin Jonsson. Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 121-132

  Conference

  This paper analyses a series of events in which a discarded box found in a garbage room is examined and taken apart in the context of a makerspace. The participants' inquiry provided a rich and multifaceted experience in various settings, including puzzle-solving, exploring physical and digital materials, engaging people with different skills. The social engagements with and around the artifacts brought certain interpretative aspects to the fore. Situated acts of interpretation worked as ways of building a coherent narrative and a meaningful experience. In the paper, we highlight the relationship between on the one hand the subjects' skills and motivations to understand and make sense of the technology at hand which we call material literacy, and on the other hand the specific material qualities that encourage or trigger certain interpretations and experiences. The qualities we discuss are: opacity, risk, authenticity, uniqueness, age, and hybridity. This study allows us to reposition the contemporary understanding of makerspaces beyond that of being places for innovation and learning.

  Read more about "It's a Bomb!" – Material Literacy and Narratives of Making

• Producing Printability

  2019. Kristin N. Dew (et al.). Human-Computer Interaction 34 (5-6), 433-469

  Article

  Three-dimensional printing is widely celebrated as enabling open design and manufacturing practice. With easy-to-use techniques such as automated modeling, fabrication machines ostensibly help designers turn ideas into fully fledged objects. Prior HCI literature focuses on improving printing through optimization and by developing printer and material capabilities. This paper expands such considerations by asking, how do 3D printing practitioners understand and create “printability?” And how might HCI better support the work that holds together printing workflows and changing ecosystems of materials and techniques? We conducted studies in two sites of open design: a technology firm in Silicon Valley, California and a makerspace in Stockholm, Sweden. Deploying workshops and interviews, we examine how practitioners negotiate the print experience, revealing a contingent process held together by trial and error exploration and careful interventions. These insights point to the value of tools and processes to support articulation work, what Strauss and colleagues have called the acts of fitting together people, tasks, and their ordering to accomplish an overarching project. We show that despite the sought-after efficiencies of such manufacturing, 3D printing entails articulation work, particularly acts of alignment, exposing messy modes of production carried out by a varied cast of practitioners, machines, and materials.

  Read more about Producing Printability

Show all publications by Sophie Landwehr Sydow at Stockholm University