Week 173

Last week Alper vis­it­ed Moscow to par­tic­i­pate in Urban Forum. He tells me he talked about “data and gen­er­a­tiv­i­ty as a prac­tice for inno­v­a­tive cities.” Mean­while I sol­diered on in the Utrecht stu­dio with half a jeal­ous eye on his Insta­gram feed.

On Mon­day I act­ed as sound­ing board for Zineb and Chris. As men­tioned ear­li­er, they are devel­op­ing a game-like inter­ven­tion for an area of the Nether­lands fac­ing pop­u­la­tion shrink­age, as part of the Stu­dio for Unso­licit­ed Archi­tec­ture. We most­ly talked about pro­to­typ­ing strate­gies for col­lec­tive intel­li­gence games—which is what they’re lean­ing towards, think World With­out Oil. Next for them is test­ing some ini­tial assign­ments, I’m curi­ous to see how that’ll turn out.

Work with Her­man on HIRAME continued—we filled up a few white­boards with con­cep­tu­al mod­els and the like. Next step is a first work­shop with the client team, which’ll hap­pen this week.

Simon and Alper worked to get a dig­i­tal pro­to­type of SAKE out the door—with a bit of help from me. I demo’d the out­come for the De Gids edi­tors on Fri­day and then set up a fresh game. They’ll play it for the com­ing weeks, after which we’ll make an inven­to­ry of issues and pos­si­ble improve­ments and kick of a sec­ond iter­a­tion. That will most like­ly hap­pen in the new year.

And final­ly, I wrote up Cer­e­mo­ny of Sur­prise for our port­fo­lio, and announced the Christ­mas drinks we’ll be hav­ing at our Utrecht stu­dio this Fri­day. If you’re read­ing this, con­sid­er your­self invited.