Week 254

Last week was trav­el heavy for both of us but Kars join­ing me here in Berlin on Tues­day (after I got back from Barcelona on Mon­day) meant we could get things done that required our com­bined presence.

Most impor­tant­ly we did our sec­ond quar­ter OKR review. The OKR results were infor­ma­tive and moti­vat­ed us to take things a step fur­ther. Q2 has seen us get­ting a huge amount of press and pub­lic­i­ty for the things we have done (you can read that back in the wee­knotes) and the ques­tion we asked our­selves is how to best put that atten­tion to use.

The OKR review also helped guide a long over­due rewrite of Hub­bub’s offer­ing. We are pleased to say that we are now a stu­dio that does ‘dig­i­tal prod­uct design for a play­ful world’. We adjust­ed most of the copy on the web­site and wrote a blog­post about the new direc­tion in an afternoon.

I post­ed a piece to Medi­um that is tan­gen­tial­ly relat­ed con­cern­ing design­ing based on user wants. Wants these days are indis­tin­guish­able from needs any­way. I got some nice feed­back on that piece and the expe­ri­ence of writ­ing on Medi­um is smooth (though also sim­i­lar to cur­rent stu­dio favorite Quip). We have some more writ­ing forth­com­ing in this vein that chal­lenges the sta­tus quo in prod­uct and ser­vice design.

The pro­pos­als we have on deck are mov­ing for­ward with one pend­ing for a fes­ti­val which promis­es to be a lot of fun and should go into pro­duc­tion soon. The oth­er ones are mov­ing for­ward with some con­clud­ing and oth­ers being pushed back while await­ing a round of funding.

We are also con­tin­u­ing work­ing on our card game KEGANI with Sub­alekha Udayasankar and we are at the point where it can be tweaked end­less­ly. That means that the game is fun already but that there is still a lot of work left to be done.