Week 205

Last week was a deci­sive week for both ASARI and SAME, projects in two coun­tries that both went through their final phases.

Kars prepped ASARI for a client pre­sen­ta­tion. He went through the con­cept with the Info.nl design team and sketched out our con­cepts for the final pre­sen­ta­tion which was received well. We have thought up a bunch of toy-like info-graph­ics that should pro­vide inter­est­ing and fun insights into the scale of the works. We also came up with an out­doors activ­i­ty that we can tie back into the web­site. Kars then start­ed to pro­to­type every­thing out in Processing.js to make it pre­cise­ly clear what we want to achieve.

I pre­pared for SAME and flew to Munich to work­shop with our client there on Wednes­day and Thurs­day togeth­er with Sebas­t­ian Deter­d­ing. We dove straight in and got invalu­able time with sub­ject mat­ter and cul­tur­al experts to cal­i­brate our think­ing with. In our two days there we man­aged to run through the full course of ideation, clus­ter­ing, con­cep­tion and playtest­ing. We also called Kars in on Skype to get some of his input. Com­press­ing all of this into such a short time­frame is a cre­ative tour de force but it does pro­vide high­ly valu­able insights.

The updat­ed Beesten­bende is doing what it should and we should be mov­ing for­ward with final­iz­ing those improve­ments and dis­till­ing a new release to deploy in the museum.

I spent most of Fri­day doing a 3D pro­gram­ming course organ­ised by my friends of UIKonf and giv­en by Sti­jn Oomes. We spent the day div­ing into both SceneK­it and OpenGL ES and talk­ing about the upcom­ing SpriteK­it frame­work in iOS7 which is sup­posed to make life for game devel­op­ers a lot eas­i­er. I may apply some of these skills in an upcom­ing project, but for now just a refresh­er in 3D pro­gram­ming and how the pipeline works on iOS was real­ly valu­able and fun.

And that same Fri­day I attend­ed the Crit­i­cal Mass Berlin. Bicy­cle cul­ture and the reap­pro­pri­a­tion of the city are things that are close to our hearts and this par­tic­u­lar event turned out to be a par­tic­u­lar­ly fun cel­e­bra­tion of cycling.

I will be rep­re­sent­ing Hub­bub at Play­ful, Mozil­la Fes­ti­val and prob­a­bly at Gamecity as well. Which means I’ll be in and around Lon­don for most of that week in October.