Week 268

After a false start on Mon­day due to a lin­ger­ing head cold I was back in action on Tues­day. We made good progress this week on KUMA (our project with KLM on game-based learn­ing) and on Bycatch (our card game about drones sur­veil­lance and remote warfare).

Let’s start with KUMA. We processed the out­comes of the first work­shop and deliv­ered them in the form of a brief. We then moved on to prepar­ing for the sec­ond work­shop, which focused on cre­at­ing a port­fo­lio of con­cepts. To this end, Alper flew in on Wednes­day to work with me in the stu­dio for the remain­der of the week.

We called in the help from Agnes to do live illus­tra­tions. This turned out to add real val­ue. They pro­vide an imme­di­ate visu­al anchor point for each idea and add an addi­tion­al dimen­sion to descrip­tions, mak­ing it eas­i­er to empathise.

Sebas­t­ian is also con­tribut­ing to the project with his con­sid­er­able knowl­edge and expe­ri­ence in the sub­ject. We had a very use­ful con­fer­ence call on Wednes­day and he sent us some use­ful last-minute input before the work­shop, despite it being a hol­i­day in Tel Aviv, his tem­po­rary place of residence.

So after ample prepa­ra­tion we ran a sec­ond pleas­ant and pro­duc­tive ses­sion from one of the neat work­shop spaces in Vecht­club XL with cater­ing from De Klub, which is hard to beat. After­wards we imme­di­ate­ly sent out the raw out­put to the client (a ben­e­fit of work­ing com­plete­ly ana­log and record­ing every­thing that is decid­ed on paper).

On to the Bycatch front. I also talked to Agnes about a first round of illus­tra­tions for the cards which we can show at Play­ful. I also talked to Ties about get­ting some offers from print­ers and get­ting his help on graph­ic design. Oth­er than this, we dis­cussed the state of the project in anoth­er call with Sub­alekha and we start­ed set­ting up a web­site for the game with Stripe Check­out built in to take pre-orders.

As if all of this was­n’t enough, Alper also fin­ished up our appli­ca­tion for a grant from Cre­ative Indus­tries Fund to do a first round of design work on All-See­ing Eye (a game about cam­era sur­veil­lance we’re work­ing on with Bits of Free­dom). Alper also start­ed prepar­ing a few design work­shops he’ll be run­ning with a Berlin-based start­up and he made plans for a work­shop we’ll be run­ning at ThingsCon Ams­ter­dam. Phew!