Week 199–200

These notes cov­er the past two weeks. Week 199 cov­ered the tail end of my hon­ey­moon on Bali. Spend­ing time on the island was a plea­sure as always. (I’ve lost count, but I think this was my sixth vis­it.) My absence com­bined with a tem­po­rary lull in client work gave Alper the oppor­tu­ni­ty to relax a lit­tle and spend some time on side projects, such as Cup­pings.

I returned to work in week 200, but was a bit hand­i­capped by a rather per­sis­tent flu. Nonethe­less, I got some work done. To start, I caught up with Alper on cur­rent affairs and trawled through an email back­log of two weeks.

Then, I start­ed work on the redesign of Beesten­bende. Revis­it­ing old design prob­lems that con­found­ed us when we last worked on them almost a year ago, I sud­den­ly found some new solu­tions that now look so obvi­ous. There’s prob­a­bly a les­son in there somewhere.

I played Alper’s per­son­al slide design­er, tweak­ing the deck of his MLOVE talk on the social issues involved with the quan­ti­fied self movement.

And I fin­ished the week design­ing my tiny game for Hide&Seek’s won­der­ful upcom­ing app. You’d think with Vic­to­ry Boo­gie Woo­gie at an end I would have had enough of col­lab­o­ra­tive sto­ry­telling games, but I came up with anoth­er one. In this case it’s for two play­ers and requires an old fash­ioned paper nov­el as a play aid. I had fun playtest­ing it over the week­end so we’re on the right track.

Alper tells me he start­ed the week doing a bit of work on Vic­to­ry Boo­gie Woo­gie (mov­ing the site into its post-game stage).

He also prepped his MLOVE talk, as men­tioned ear­li­er, and deliv­ered it on Thurs­day. It was titled “The Quan­ti­fied Good Life”. I believe things went well, in par­tic­u­lar the Q&A after­wards along­side fel­low Dutch­men Yuri van Geest and Maarten den Braber. The dri­ve back from the even­t’s venue, a cas­tle out­side of Berlin, took Alper 10 hours, due to ter­ri­ble weath­er and result­ing traf­fic. I’m glad he made it back in one piece.

The rest of the week was main­ly tak­en up by SAME, a con­sul­tan­cy gig for our sec­ond Ger­man client (an auto­mo­bile man­u­fac­tur­er) for which we’ve part­nered up with stu­dio friend Sebas­t­ian Deter­d­ing. The first work­shop for this is due to take place this week. Alper will be on site togeth­er with Sebas­t­ian (it’s a Ger­man lan­guage affair) I’ll be stand­by in Utrecht.