Week 131

It’s been very much a heads-down week. We start­ed with a bit of a crunch on the game design and art style for Saba. Karel did a great job on a num­ber of sketch­es that show how we intend to make the cab­i­net of curiosi­ties we’re design­ing for come to life, while at the same time ref­er­enc­ing field jour­nals of 19th cen­tu­ry nat­ur­al sci­en­tists. Hanne wrote an elab­o­rate sce­nario that illus­trates our intend­ed play­er expe­ri­ence. This serves as a very use­ful guid­ing light for future work. She also came up with an ele­gant way to test our design using paper and some off-the-shelf tech­nolo­gies. (A playtest is sched­uled for next week.) Mean­while I built a deck of slides to present all of this to our client. This went well, we received an infor­mal green light (to be con­firmed this week), got some con­struc­tive feed­back, but no major issues were raised. So we’re on track. Good!

Mean­while, over in our Berlin FOB, Alper is work­ing on an ini­tial tech­ni­cal proof-of-con­cept for Saba. Things seem to be shap­ing up well, so I expect we’ll be able to give it a spin some­where in the next few weeks.

Erwin and I also final­ized the Galaxy Tours mate­ri­als with help from BUROPONY and sent them off to the client. The fin­ish line on this project is very close now!

Oth­er than this, my time is being tak­en up by a slight­ly ridicu­lous amount of presentations.

I lec­tured to Design for Inter­ac­tion mas­ter stu­dents in Delft on thurs­day, on invi­ta­tion of my This hap­pened co-con­spir­a­tor Ianus. I did a reprise of Irene and my Interaction12 talk on Pig Chase. The response from the present fac­ul­ty was very encour­ag­ing and the many ques­tions I received from stu­dents very stim­u­lat­ing. After­wards, we toured the won­der­ful Indus­tri­al Design Engi­neer­ing fac­ul­ty build­ing and had a few beers in the IDStu­di­o­Lab.

I round­ed off the week with prepa­ra­tions for my work­shop on Galaxy Tours at Noord­hoff Sci­ence Teacher’s Con­fer­ence (which hap­pens tomor­row), my talk on Kop­pelkiek at Social Cities of Tomor­row (this Fri­day) and my LIFT12 lec­ture (next week).