Week 270

My week start­ed with the sec­ond day of the Asia-Europe Cul­ture Min­is­ters Meet­ing (ASEM)‘s work­shop on play­ful cities. It was a huge plea­sure spend­ing two days with tal­ent­ed peers from Europe, many of whom’s work I admire great­ly. It was equal­ly great to meet Asian prac­ti­tion­ers and hear about the big dif­fer­ences in their local con­texts. By the end of the day we had gone very, very deep into the chal­lenges of lever­ag­ing a play doc­trine to for­mu­late a coun­ter­ar­gu­ment to the pre­vail­ing smart cities rhetoric. One com­ment I post­ed about this got a very pro­duc­tive dis­cus­sion between some big thinkers in the field over at Face­book.

In the mean­time Alper trav­eled by train to the Nether­lands and got a decent amount of work in, pro­cess­ing the out­comes from his work with Affec­tive Sys­tems and resub­mit­ting All-See­ing Eye proposal.

The whole of Tues­day was tak­en up by our third and for the moment final work­shop with KLM. Now all that is left for us to do is doc­u­ment all the out­comes and deliv­er them, after which we’ll start explor­ing next steps.

On Wednes­day, a fun inter­view with us about our way of work­ing togeth­er remote­ly was pub­lished in Dutch on Achter het Scherm.

I spent most of that day and the next fin­ish­ing up the web­site for Bycatch and then trav­eled to Lon­don on Thurs­day, as did Alper.

That Fri­day, we attend­ed Play­ful, where Sub­alekha talked about our work on Bycatch so far, and we flipped the switch on pre­orders. If you want to be one of the first to own a copy of this card game about drone sur­veil­lance and remote war­fare, go on and click that “add to cart”-button.

Play­ful was a plea­sure as always, with stand­out ses­sions (as far as I’m con­cerned) from Aard­man’s Dan Efer­gan and George Rowe on east­er eggs in videogames, Bone­loaf’s James Brown on the mak­ing of Gang Beasts and Ida Marie Toft’s love­ly and weird hybrid per­for­mance-game Love­birds.

The day after Play­ful, while watch­ing the first orders trick­le in via our Slack-Stripe inte­gra­tion, we made good use of the oppor­tu­ni­ty of being all three phys­i­cal­ly co-present and furi­ous­ly tweaked and tuned Bycatch’s rules.

I trav­eled back that same evening. Alper stuck around for a Cup­pings cof­fee tast­ing expe­di­tion in Fitzrovia and head­ed back on Sunday.

While recov­er­ing from a pret­ty intense week, our friends at ThingsCon Ams­ter­dam announced the work­shop Alper and Ianus will run on play­ful prod­uct design.