Hubbub has gone into hibernation.

Tag Archives: play

Engaging sleep mode

First of all, best wish­es for the new year. Before look­ing ahead, a quick look back. 2015 was great for us. In our end-of-year review of 2014 we said we want­ed to bal­ance cre­ative suc­cess with more com­mer­cial suc­cess. And we did. Busi­ness was good in 2015. We did much more con­sult­ing com­pared to the year […]

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Shifting from Gamification to Playful Design

This is a light­ly edit­ed tran­script of a short lec­ture I deliv­ered some time ago at an off-site gath­er­ing orga­nized by one of NL’s largest con­struc­­tion-ser­vices busi­ness­es. The event explored the poten­tial of games, game design and gam­i­fi­ca­tion for prop­er­ty devel­op­ment and con­struc­tion. This talk cre­ates a com­mon frame of under­stand­ing about gam­i­fi­ca­tion and why […]

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New Planning Methods

This is a write­up of my talk at the event ‘Nieuwe Plan­ningsmeth­o­d­en’ (‘New Plan­ning Meth­ods’) in Pakhuis de Zwi­jger, Ams­ter­dam on Octo­ber 8, 2015. Hel­lo. My name is Kars Alfrink. I am a design­er and part­ner at Hub­bub, a small play­ful design agency, based in Utrecht and Berlin. Hub­bub helps organ­i­sa­tions do things with games, play […]

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Designing Playful Museum Exhibitions

In Feb­ru­ary of this year I went over to Rein­wardt Acad­e­my to work with exhi­bi­tion direc­tion stu­dents. I was invit­ed by Mario Jelle­ma to share my per­spec­tive on the role of play and play­ful­ness in muse­ums. I enjoy talk­ing to stu­dents, but I like work­ing hands-on with them even more. So we turned the session […]

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Week 296

I was in the Nether­lands last week to fin­ish the first beta of SHACHI. The three of us (Kars, myself and Hedge­field) went to the Air­borne Muse­um in Oost­er­beek on Wednes­day to playtest it. Playtests are absolute­ly essen­tial to val­i­date both for us and our clients that what we are doing is going in the […]

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Highlights from Play Matters

In my review of Play Mat­ters I talked about why I think it is a must-read for any design­er. I thought I’d fol­low that up with some high­lights from the book. These are most­ly from the first two chap­ters. Miguel first talks about what play is. He offers a min­i­mal def­i­n­i­tion which states that play is […]

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Play Matters

When Miguel Sicart’s Play Mat­ters was pub­lished in August of last year it imme­di­ate­ly went on my to-read list but it took me a while before pick­ing it up. When I did I was imme­di­ate­ly hooked. Not since The Well-Played Game have a I come across such a thought­ful treat­ment of play. Play Mat­ters is also […]

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An Outline of Playful Design

In the sum­mer of last year we announced a new direc­tion for the stu­dio, which boils down to us no longer fram­ing our work as game design, but as play­ful design. We are inter­est­ed in design­ing a wide range of play­things, and we are also inter­est­ed in design­ing things that aren’t pri­mar­i­ly meant for play […]

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Five Behaviour Design Principles You Never Suspected Would Work

A while ago, I was invit­ed by friend-of-the-stu­­dio Iskan­der Smit to speak at a Behav­ior Design Ams­ter­dam meet­up. Much of our work is relat­ed to behav­iour change, but we try to steer clear of the reduc­tion­ist think­ing that is quite preva­lent in the field. So I decid­ed to use the oppor­tu­ni­ty of pre­sent­ing to a […]

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A new direction for the studio

Today we’ve updat­ed our front page and about page to reflect a new direc­tion for the stu­dio: dig­i­tal prod­uct design for a play­ful world. The way we see it, play­ful­ness has become an impor­tant qual­i­ty for a wide range of prod­ucts. It invites peo­ple into an expe­ri­ence, enables them to con­nect to oth­ers and express themselves, […]

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