Announcing Deterding, Dormans and Keller as first Hubbub associates

Today I am very pleased to announce we have been joined by three bril­liant gen­tle­men: Sebas­t­ian Deter­d­ing, Joris Dor­mans and Ianus Keller have joined Hub­bub as asso­ciates. They are imme­di­ate­ly avail­able for con­sult­ing and will also help us guide the com­pa­ny in the future.

Each of these asso­ciates is an expert in their field and has a for­mi­da­ble track record as a design­er, researcher and edu­ca­tor. They deep­en as well as broad­en what we can bring to the table in projects relat­ed to game design, inter­ac­tion design, prod­uct design and beyond.

Below are brief bios list­ing some of our asso­ciates’ achieve­ments. We’ve also sug­gest­ed areas you might want to work on with them. Of course, we will also sug­gest an asso­ciate if we think a project will ben­e­fit from their par­tic­i­pa­tion. For good mea­sure, we’ve thrown in self­ies tak­en at the workplace.

Alper and I have col­lab­o­rat­ed with each of these three in some way in the past years and we are hum­bled and proud they have cho­sen to work with Hub­bub. If you’d like to know more, get in touch.

Sebas­t­ian Deter­d­ing is a lead­ing researcher and design­er in the field of game­ful and play­ful design. He is co-edi­tor (with Stef­fen P. Walz) of “The Game­ful World: Approach­es, Issues, Appli­ca­tions”, poised to become the de-fac­to hand­book on game­ful and play­ful design, appear­ing 2014 with MIT Press. Hav­ing com­plet­ed his PhD, Sebas­t­ian is now vis­it­ing assis­tant pro­fes­sor at the RIT Lab­o­ra­to­ry for Media, Arts, Games, Inter­ac­tion and Cre­ativ­i­ty (MAGIC). He has worked for more than nine years as a game and expe­ri­ence design­er, and is an inter­na­tion­al­ly sought-after speak­er. He pub­lished his first RPG adven­ture in a now-defunct mag­a­zine at age 17 and saw it prompt­ly plagiarised.

Top­ics to work on with Sebas­t­ian include: game­ful and play­ful design, seri­ous games and gamification.

Joris Dor­mans is one of the first to com­plete a PhD on a top­ic that explic­it­ly con­nects game design to com­put­er sci­ence. He is the inven­tor of the “Machi­na­tions” frame­work and co-author (with Ernest Adams) of the book “Game Mechan­ics”. Joris is a high­ly rat­ed speak­er at the Game Devel­op­er Con­fer­ences in both San Fran­cis­co and Cologne and an inter­na­tion­al­ly respect­ed researcher on pro­ce­dur­al con­tent gen­er­a­tion. Joris has an entry as game design­er on boardgamegeek.com and is always tin­ker­ing with mul­ti­ple boardgame pro­to­types of his own.

Top­ics to work on with Joris include: mod­el­ling game mechan­ics, auto­mat­ed game design, pro­ce­dur­al con­tent generation.

Ianus Keller is a staunch pro­po­nent of inter­ac­tion design and one of the first to see it as the field where prod­ucts, inter­faces and oth­er con­cerns con­verge. He com­plet­ed his PhD cum laude at TU Delft ID-Stu­di­o­Lab on the design of Cab­i­net, an inspi­ra­tional tool for design­ers. Since 2008 Ianus has co-organ­ised 29 This Hap­pened events in Utrecht, Ams­ter­dam and Rot­ter­dam, doc­u­ment­ing the mak­ing-of of over a hun­dred inter­ac­tion design projects. Ianus is a vora­cious ear­ly adopter of gad­gets and online ser­vices; in 2005 he was the first Dutch­man to post a tweet, which read “I am at home”.

Top­ics to work on with Ianus include: tools for cre­ativ­i­ty, hybrid digital/physical products.