Week 130

Work last week hap­pened in the few days squeezed between my return from Berlin, where I par­tic­i­pat­ed in the Glob­al Game Jam, and my trip to Dublin, to attend and speak at Interaction12.

There was for­ward move­ment on Saba, with Karel mak­ing progress on the art style, and Hanne bang­ing out a play­er sce­nario rais­ing many inter­est­ing issues. We’re going to merge every­thing for a client pre­sen­ta­tion on Wednes­day of this week.

Galaxy Tours took anoth­er step towards com­ple­tion. I worked with Erwin to com­plete the map that is designed by my broth­er Ties at BUROPONY. We had to place all the loca­tions on it, which isn’t the most intel­lec­tu­al­ly chal­leng­ing task but does take a lot of care. We also col­lect­ed all the stock pho­tog­ra­phy we need to illus­trate the loca­tion descrip­tions. The map has been sent to the print­er and the design of the rest of the mate­ri­als will fin­ish this week. We’ll put the last bits of data into it, and then it’s all ready for pre­sent­ing at a Noord­hoff event next week.

The rest of the week I spent in Dublin for Interaction12, which was a good expe­ri­ence, most­ly due to meet­ing old acquain­tances and mak­ing new ones. Which is the point of these events of course. Wether it was in the shiny CCD con­fer­ence venue, drink­ing cask whisky in the Stag’s Head, sip­ping cham­pagne at the award cer­e­mo­ny, while hav­ing din­ner with playful/persuasive design­ers in Bleu Bistro, or drink­ing pints of Guin­ness and enjoy­ing the view from the Grav­i­ty Bar – the con­ver­sa­tions and com­pa­ny were always stim­u­lat­ing. As far as the con­fer­ence talks went, high­lights included:

• Antho­ny Dunne’s col­lec­tion of inspir­ing spec­u­la­tive design projects, and the accom­pa­ny­ing frames for think­ing about what makes for good prac­tice in this field. Very rel­e­vant to our work on Pig Chase.
• Jonas Löw­gren’s exposé of sketch­ing and explor­ing as key ‘design­er­ly’ ways of work­ing. I can’t say how glad I am to see a keynote by an aca­d­e­m­ic and edu­ca­tor that is so ground­ed in prac­tice, and isn’t afraid to use “old” work as examples.
• Sebas­t­ian Deter­d­ing’s com­pre­hen­sive and author­i­ta­tive pre­sen­ta­tion of a mod­el for behav­ior change through design that is sen­si­ble and eth­i­cal­ly sound.
• Genevieve Bell’s strong argu­ment for recon­sid­er­ing the way we’re inclined to relate to tech­nol­o­gy, that is often based on fear or an urge to be in con­trol, which in turn makes tech­nol­o­gy needy. A bet­ter way would be to think of tech­nolo­gies as companions.

Togeth­er with Irene van Peer I pre­sent­ed on Pig Chase. We were pro­grammed in the same time slot as Dan Saf­fer’s humor­ous take­down of design think­ing, so atten­dance was­n’t as high as it could’ve been. But we had a nice audi­ence regard­less and received many nice com­ments after­wards. I won’t post the talk, but instead will rec­om­mend the grow­ing series of blog post on the project web­site. The last install­ment being about our use of mock adver­tise­ments.