Week 272

Last week was a fair­ly qui­et week over at the stu­dio. Kars did the deliv­ery for our engage­ment over at KLM and then got ready to go on hol­i­day to Seoul where he is right now.

Bycatch was fea­tured over at Killscreen with a very nice article.

I was sick for most of the week but I did make it over to Ams­ter­dam to hold a work­shop at ThingsCon there on Fri­day togeth­er with Ianus. We did a ses­sion called “Play­ful Devices Improv” and every­body had a lot of fun think­ing of new approach­es to con­nect­ed prod­ucts. We asked par­tic­i­pants to take kitchen devices and come up with a char­ac­ter for them. With these char­ac­ters they would then have to devise sto­ries and final­ly these sto­ries were act­ed out over the kitchen counter.

The groups did real­ly well, each one had sev­er­al inter­est­ing finds and as a whole the work­shop real­ly showed that adding fric­tion to sit­u­a­tions can be more pro­duc­tive than start­ing from a func­tion­al per­spec­tive. And even though we ran the work­shop fair­ly freeform, the ideation that came out of it was as good or maybe even bet­ter than what you would get in a more for­mal setting.

On Sat­ur­day I vis­it­ed the Inter­face Cri­tique event at the Uni­ver­si­ty of the Arts in Berlin which was an inter­est­ing con­trast from the applied think­ing at ThingsCon the day before.