Hubbub has gone into hibernation.

Week 219

Hav­ing returned from Lon­don over the week­end, I was back in the Utrecht stu­dio and joined by Alper who would be here the whole week. Our nor­mal rou­tine of remote col­lab­o­ra­tion is pret­ty effec­tive but it’s fun—and useful—to have the occa­sion­al week of work­ing face-to-face.

Hanging

On Mon­day I tied up some loose ends from our work at the RCA the pre­vi­ous week. I also did some prepa­ra­tions for our work on Beesten­bende that week. Mean­while, Alper wrote an epic wee­knote cov­er­ing our adven­tures in London.

The next day, Alper worked on Beesten­bende, push­ing out anoth­er update of the iPod/iPhone ver­sion which should be the one we base the iPad mini ver­sion on. This update was relat­ed to an edge case in which two teams would fin­ish the game with the same score. We had already built in a tie-break­er but the feed­back when this kicked in was­n’t as clear as it could be. So we fixed that. It’s anoth­er tiny improve­ment to what is slow­ly but sure­ly turn­ing out to be a very pol­ished muse­um game app.

Mean­while, I most­ly took care of some finances, punc­tu­at­ed by some assis­tance with the Beesten­bende improvements.

On Wednes­day Simon joined us for a full day of design work on iPad mini Beesten­bende. He had already sketched out some visu­al designs, which we reviewed and improved on. By the end of the day they were off to the client with an accom­pa­ny­ing rationale.

That day Alper and I also found the time to fid­dle with AJI, get­ting more than a lit­tle annoyed with Xcode’s obscure han­dling of constraints.

The main rea­son for Alper’s stay in NL hap­pened on Thurs­day. We were vis­it­ed by a few folks from Shell to reflect on our work with them ear­li­er this year on Rip­ple Effect. We explored the pos­si­bil­i­ties for a next stage of the project and we played a phys­i­cal pro­to­type con­tain­ing many improve­ments over the ver­sion we pilot­ed. I always enjoy doing this with clients. There’s some­thing very approach­able about phys­i­cal pro­to­types which makes them excel­lent tools for cre­ative col­lab­o­ra­tion. The fact that you can just imme­di­ate­ly apply a rules change and see its effect makes it a use­ful and fun way to dis­cuss design directions.

On Fri­day I took care of a zil­lion tiny things on my to-do list in prepa­ra­tion for a week of vaca­tion in NYC. I hand­ed over some things which Alper will take care of in my absence, after which he hopped on an ICE to Berlin, and I hopped on my bike home.

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