Week 255

This week start­ed on a high note with the open­ing of restau­rant De Klub at Vecht­club XL—the cre­ative work­space in which our Utrecht stu­dio is locat­ed. It is a love­ly space serv­ing good food and drink (includ­ing fine cof­fees) but most impor­tant­ly a great place for serendip­i­tous encoun­ters with oth­er Vecht­club res­i­dents and peo­ple from out­side of the building.

Much of my atten­tion was ded­i­cat­ed to get­ting project FUNKOROGASHI set up. On Mon­day I adjust­ed the pro­pos­al we had sent out ear­li­er with a new con­cept Alper and I had come up with in Berlin the pre­vi­ous week. On Thurs­day I head­ed over to Eind­hoven for a meet­ing with the client. We dis­cussed and adjust­ed the con­cept, then went out for a tour of Strijp‑S which will be the site of the project. When I got back I imme­di­ate­ly banged out a third iter­a­tion of the pro­pos­al and sent it out, ready for signing.

Mean­while Alper went hunt­ing for a rather elu­sive Beesten­bende bug. With help from the mighty Chris Eid­hof he even­tu­al­ly man­aged to locate and fix it.

We were also pleased to sign a con­tract for a new project with KLM which we’ve code­named KUMA. It’s con­cept devel­op­ment, which includes work­shops and stu­dio work, aimed at pro­vid­ing insight into the pos­si­bil­i­ties of game-based learn­ing for a par­tic­u­lar appli­ca­tion domain. This will kick off next month and we are very much look­ing for­ward to it.

Dutch news week­ly Vrij Ned­er­land pub­lished a piece on cof­fee and was kind enough to include a link Cup­pings—our super sim­ple app for find­ing great cof­fee near you. This imme­di­ate­ly pro­pelled it into the app store charts again.

I final­ly found the time to write up and pub­lish the talk I gave some time ago at a Behav­ior Design Ams­ter­dam meet­up. It’s an attempt to describe an alter­na­tive approach to design for behav­iour change which puts peo­ple first and strives to increase in stead of dimin­ish their agency.

Through­out the week we had numer­ous meet­ings. Alper wel­comed a group of stu­dents from Belarus to the stu­dio who were on an out­ing organ­ised by the Hein­rich Böll Foun­da­tion. He also enter­tained friends-of-the-stu­dio Ernst-Jan Pfauth and Jus­tus Bruns. I met with cura­tor Ine Gev­ers to dis­cuss games and art, vis­it­ed our friends Per­cep­tor at their the Hague stu­dio and talked inter­ac­tion design edu­ca­tion with Vik­tor Wij­nen who has just become head of the game and inter­ac­tion design pro­gram at the Utrecht School of the Arts, my alma mater.

We also vis­it­ed a Utrecht escape room and once again failed to solve it in time. I did how­ev­er man­age to nail one whole puz­zle, large­ly thanks to its visu­al nature.

The week end­ed for me with a very wel­come month­ly Bier­club (“beer club”) in the sun at De Klub. Over the week­end I watched a few games of Dota 2 at The Inter­na­tion­al and Smash Bros and Street Fight­er at EVO. Mean­while in Berlin, Alper tells me he caught up on email.