Björn Hartmann
Björn is a designer, academic, tinkerer, recovering musician, scatterbrain. Born in 1978, Björn grew up in the Mannheim/Heidelberg area in south-western Germany. After a move to Munich in the mid-90's, B. got involved in the PC-demo scene and ran a BBS system for song-swapping. Working under the alias "G-Sus", B. was a member of various tracking crews like HBE, PP and CN. By 1996, B. was also DJing regularly at local parties.
In 1997, B. moved to Philadelphia to attend the University of Pennsylvania. His DJ-career in America was relaunched after connecting with 611 Records. For the years to follow, he played small lounges to big raves on the East Coast on a regular basis. In 2000, B. teamed up with Jay Haze and Sean O'Neal and launched the minimal tech-house label Tuning Spork. Besides producing and DJing, Bjoern also led the graphic design of the label for five years. In Philadelphia, Tuning Spork organized a series of well-known monthly and one-off events, along with now-legendary loft afterparties. B. has hosted and played alongside DJs and producers such as Richie Hawtin, Daniel Bell, Jeff Milligan, Dinky, Kero, Adam Marshall, Tomas Jirku, Falko Brocksieper, Mia, Brett Johnson, Shawn Rudiman and others.
In 2002, B. graduated from U Penn with degrees in Communication, Digital Media Design and Computer Science. Together with Jay Haze, B. relocated to Amsterdam, NL, to work on Contexterrior Media, an umbrella company controlling the labels Tuning Spork, Contexterrior, and Future Dub. Additionally, B. conceived of and built the netlabel textone.org, which released free minimal music by established artists and new faces under a creative commons license. B. has played gigs in the Netherlands, France, Switzerland, Germany, Denmark and Poland. In November 2003 he went on a seven date, three week tour of Japan.
After a stint as a research engineer at a university lab in Paris, B. returned to the United States in 2004 to start a PhD in Computer Science at Stanford University. Focusing on human computer interaction, Bjoern has been developing software and hardware for interaction design prototyping and is actively teaching physical interaction design to undergraduate and graduate students. He has worked with product designers at IDEO on medical interfaces and sensor-based game scenarios. His prototyping tools have been used at Bay Area design and research companies such as Leapfrog, Nokia Design, IDEO, and Frog design. In 2007, Bjoern founded the interactive art collective Digital Dacha along with Scott Doorley, Parul Vora, Kevin Collins and Dan Maynes-Aminzade. The group has thus far exhibited two large-scale interactive murals at the San Jose Museum of Art.