Week 180

I had the plea­sure of spend­ing most of this week work­ing at our Berlin stu­dio face-to-face with Alper.

A large part of our time was tak­en up with work on FURAPPA. We spent sev­er­al ses­sions over the course of the week gen­er­at­ing ideas. We’ll go over those next, pick the best ones and devel­op them a bit fur­ther so they can be pre­sent­ed. This is a short engage­ment, but we hope to be asked to devel­op some of these con­cepts fur­ther in the next phase. For sure, we’re already rather excit­ed about some of the more out­landish ones.

Anoth­er rea­son for my trip to Berlin was the slight­ly belat­ed strat­e­gy ses­sion that was still on our list. We spent an after­noon think­ing out loud about the near and slight­ly more dis­tant future of our prac­tice, punc­tu­at­ed by a few games of darts and hand-ground cof­fee rit­u­als.

Since the num­ber, scope and scale of projects we are tak­ing on has increased quite a bit, we decid­ed to set up a resource plan­ning. As with all these admin­is­tra­tive tools we strive to keep things light-weight but effec­tive. Alper, who is now firm­ly in the sad­dle as our sec­ond man­ag­ing part­ner, put togeth­er just the thing and I am enjoy­ing the added insight into the busi­ness already.

Alper squeezed in work on a con­fer­ence sub­mis­sion, which will con­tin­ue our inves­ti­ga­tion into games-as-rit­u­als and also include not just talk­ing but also doing. I am sure reg­u­lar read­ers of this blog know that is some­thing we feel strong­ly about.

All of this was punc­tu­at­ed by a num­ber of Skype calls with poten­tial clients, friends and pos­si­ble future col­lab­o­ra­tors. Con­tract nego­ti­a­tions for the sec­ond stage of KAIGARA also got under­way in earnest.

And so on Sat­ur­day, I hopped on a train back to Utrecht. Dur­ing the six-hour ride I had the plea­sure of look­ing back on what can only be described as Yet Anoth­er Good Week.