On Monday I got several visits from friends, family and colleagues, all curious about my new workspace. It was enjoyable—we even played some Animal Upon Animal with Eelco’s kids—but not conducive to much productivity. I mainly did financial and administrative tasks.
Alper, meanwhile, returned from a much-deserved long weekend relaxing (and drinking coffee) in Oslo. He spent the day catching up on current affairs.
We reviewed the past week’s sprint for AJI the next day. We’ve been working in short, one-week sprints. This is a good way to stay nimble and only focus on the most pressing matters. Later that day, Simon joined us to plan the upcoming sprint focussing mostly on the website accompanying the app.
During most of this Kelli was present to observe how we work by listening in on our calls. I also spent another few hours talking to her about other projects such as CHUTORO and just generally about our take on gamification. She’ll be doing more research and then get to writing (a task I do not envy her, it’s a lot to chew on). I look forward to seeing her article in Vrij Nederland.
Alper discussed business over lunch, and I spent the afternoon trying to tame the Email Beast.
We started Wednesday with a call about a possible new project related to reuse of vacant real-estate. Alper buckled down to work on AJI while I headed over to Jeroen’s new workspace in FreedomLab to go over the schedule for a workshop about a new festival for games and game culture.
The next day, Alper continued work on AJI. I was particularly amused and impressed with the press release he put together explaining what the app does in “Oprah-speak”. Meanwhile, I prepared for and subsequently delivered a lecture at the HvA. This was followed by a critique session in which I got to play a ton of prototypes made by the students in GameMaker.
That evening, I had a ball playing a super villain caught in a bureaucratic nightmare, in a short larp made by former Hubbub intern Arjen. Short larps are an interesting phenomenon—the limited duration coupled with themes diverging from the typical scifi and fantasy fare is inviting to people who’d normally not participate in a weekend-long game.
On Friday, Simon, Alper and I had another call about AJI, going over the website screens I’d sketched. We managed to whittle my proposed set of designs down to even more of a bare minimum. The minimalism was offset by some exciting interactions that I hope we’ll manage to pull off. They’re quite dramatic.
Alper had another meeting over lunch, and later that day we joined in one more call exploring a possible future collaboration between us and a kindred spirit in NYC. I ended the week with my very first “Bierclub” (Friday drinks) at Vechtclub XL, which was nice and convivial and included locally brewed craft beer.
So yeah, a good week. It involved a lot of talking and setting up of things for what will hopefully be interesting future projects. It was a bit of a challenge to get my bit in for AJI in between all the meetings and such. I hope to make up for it this week.
Week 237
On Monday I got several visits from friends, family and colleagues, all curious about my new workspace. It was enjoyable—we even played some Animal Upon Animal with Eelco’s kids—but not conducive to much productivity. I mainly did financial and administrative tasks.
Alper, meanwhile, returned from a much-deserved long weekend relaxing (and drinking coffee) in Oslo. He spent the day catching up on current affairs.
We reviewed the past week’s sprint for AJI the next day. We’ve been working in short, one-week sprints. This is a good way to stay nimble and only focus on the most pressing matters. Later that day, Simon joined us to plan the upcoming sprint focussing mostly on the website accompanying the app.
During most of this Kelli was present to observe how we work by listening in on our calls. I also spent another few hours talking to her about other projects such as CHUTORO and just generally about our take on gamification. She’ll be doing more research and then get to writing (a task I do not envy her, it’s a lot to chew on). I look forward to seeing her article in Vrij Nederland.
Alper discussed business over lunch, and I spent the afternoon trying to tame the Email Beast.
We started Wednesday with a call about a possible new project related to reuse of vacant real-estate. Alper buckled down to work on AJI while I headed over to Jeroen’s new workspace in FreedomLab to go over the schedule for a workshop about a new festival for games and game culture.
The next day, Alper continued work on AJI. I was particularly amused and impressed with the press release he put together explaining what the app does in “Oprah-speak”. Meanwhile, I prepared for and subsequently delivered a lecture at the HvA. This was followed by a critique session in which I got to play a ton of prototypes made by the students in GameMaker.
That evening, I had a ball playing a super villain caught in a bureaucratic nightmare, in a short larp made by former Hubbub intern Arjen. Short larps are an interesting phenomenon—the limited duration coupled with themes diverging from the typical scifi and fantasy fare is inviting to people who’d normally not participate in a weekend-long game.
On Friday, Simon, Alper and I had another call about AJI, going over the website screens I’d sketched. We managed to whittle my proposed set of designs down to even more of a bare minimum. The minimalism was offset by some exciting interactions that I hope we’ll manage to pull off. They’re quite dramatic.
Alper had another meeting over lunch, and later that day we joined in one more call exploring a possible future collaboration between us and a kindred spirit in NYC. I ended the week with my very first “Bierclub” (Friday drinks) at Vechtclub XL, which was nice and convivial and included locally brewed craft beer.
So yeah, a good week. It involved a lot of talking and setting up of things for what will hopefully be interesting future projects. It was a bit of a challenge to get my bit in for AJI in between all the meetings and such. I hope to make up for it this week.