Week 141

We’re try­ing to focus on a few projects late­ly. The idea is to have few­er things going on at the same time, so that each gets the atten­tion we feel it deserves. Last week this renewed focus payed off. We got a lot of work done on both Saba and Kani and I feel good about the qual­i­ty of the work.

On Mon­day, I worked togeth­er with Hanne to pre­pare for the design work­shop at Kani’s client. We had been devel­op­ing an idea for an exer­cise with which we could get some feed­back on our con­cep­tu­al direc­tion as well as get a feel for our tar­get audi­ence’s will­ing­ness to play.

We played through the thing as we had planned, con­clud­ed it was­n’t quite up to scratch and made some nec­es­sary adjust­ments. After anoth­er play-through we felt con­fi­dent it would be up to the task. We pre­pared some slides to guide the group through the exer­cise, final­ized our mate­ri­als and called it a day.

On Tues­day we ran the work­shop on site at the clien­t’s hos­pi­tal. We shared insights from our inter­views with var­i­ous rep­re­sen­ta­tives of the many dif­fer­ent dis­ci­plines that keep a hos­pi­tal run­ning. We were tak­en on guid­ed tours to get a sense of the phys­i­cal space and then we ran our play­ful exer­cise. The for­mat held up well. It was easy enough to get into, peo­ple had fun. We got a lot out of it both in terms of observed behav­ior as well as con­tent pro­duced by the par­tic­i­pants. All stuff to chew on in the week to come.

The rest of the week I worked with Alper to final­ize a new test ver­sion of Saba. I focused on get­ting all the copy and art in, while he worked to make the game’s engine tick. Next Wednes­day we’ll go back to the muse­um and test with a num­ber of fam­i­lies again. It’s the first full ver­sion we’re test­ing in terms of con­tent and fea­tures. I’m curi­ous to see how it will hold up.

In between, I had the plea­sure to vis­it Delft Uni­ver­si­ty of Tech­nol­o­gy on invi­ta­tion of Ianus to cri­tique work by Design for Inter­ac­tion stu­dents. This con­sist­ed of sev­er­al hand­fuls of con­cepts com­mu­ni­cat­ed in the shape of post­cards, which I was sent with­out knowl­edge of the brief. I went through all of these, judg­ing whether I “got” what each con­cept was about, what I thought about the way it was com­mu­ni­cat­ed and wether it made me think of any oth­er work in the field. I shared my per­spec­tive in a short, 45-minute pre­sen­ta­tion ear­ly on Fri­day morn­ing. After­wards I hung out in the cen­tral space of Indus­tri­al Design Engi­neer­ing’s love­ly faculty.

Final­ly, I should men­tion we pub­lished a final post on the mak­ing of Pig Chase’s con­cept video over at the Play­ing with Pigs blog. This one is about var­i­ous ways i which mak­ing a con­cept video can be a valu­able design exercise.

And with that, anoth­er long week­end kicked off, this time because of the Nether­lands’ noto­ri­ous Koninginnedag.