Week 169

Last week start­ed out with a vis­it to the Utrecht Med­ical Cen­tre to dis­cuss a pos­si­ble new project. I was intro­duced to this by my younger broth­er Ties, who is one third of the infa­mous Pony Design Club, a graph­ic design stu­dio and also of Dufarge, whose appar­el I reg­u­lar­ly sport. Any­way, the project is about the med­ical cham­bers in the hos­pi­tal, and pos­si­ble changes around them. Games and play might be a way to facil­i­tate some of the adjust­ment required of the peo­ple using these spaces. We’ll see.

On Tues­day I had the plea­sure of shar­ing a desk at Top­i­ka, a design stu­dio found­ed by my one time This hap­pened cocon­spir­a­tor Alexan­der Zeh. The stu­dio is part of the Open Coop, which also used to be home to our prin­ci­pal tech­nol­o­gist Alper—and still is to the Open State Foun­da­tion, of which he is a board mem­ber. This is a spe­cial kind of cre­ative hub, one that is whol­ly owned by its inhab­i­tants. Hence the name coop, short for coop­er­a­tive. It’s an inspir­ing place. It shows what’s pos­si­ble when peo­ple throw in their lots togeth­er and for­go indi­vid­ual inter­ests. The shared lunch­es pre­pared by one of the atten­dant com­pa­nies is one case in point—you won’t find this in a reg­u­lar incu­ba­tor. The amaz­ing work being done around archi­tec­ture and urban plan­ning such as with the Kamer­mak­er—a mas­sive 3D print­er that will even­tu­al­ly print buildings—only sweet­ens the deal. Ams­ter­dam Noord as a whole, where the Open Coop is sit­u­at­ed, is an excit­ing place.

It was in this entourage that I got to spend a good few hours just work­ing through some designs for Vic­to­ry Boo­gie Woogie—which nice­ly off­set the pre­vi­ous week’s all talk­ing and no making.

On Wednes­day there was the month­ly Dutch Game Gar­den net­work­ing lunch. Also a pleas­ant few hours spent talk­ing with Bren­dan Dawes over cof­fee at The Vil­lage. And to top it off the TEDx­Utrecht speak­ers din­ner. Talk­ing, in oth­er words. But good, stim­u­lat­ing talk nonetheless.

Then on Thurs­day, I attend­ed and spoke at TEDx­Utrecht. Could­n’t be much more pleased with how my own con­tri­bu­tion went. I’ll blog it as soon as pos­si­ble. The venue, great turnout, pleas­ant atmos­phere and good line­up all con­spired to make this a thor­ough­ly enjoy­able event. Utrecht does­n’t see enough of these high pro­file events, cer­tain­ly not ones that are pro­duced by a grass­roots team of folk well embed­ded in the local cre­ative scenes. This was a nice change.

To wrap up the week I vis­it­ed the UMC once more for a tour of a num­ber of med­ical chambers—a guer­ril­la field study of sorts. And I spent a few hours at Tin­ker, pre­sent­ing Hub­bub’s work, learn­ing about their prac­tice, and dis­cussing the over­laps between game design and exhi­bi­tion design, also with Sjo­erd of Monoban­da who had joined us.