Week 282

A large part of this week was tak­en up by our annu­al OKR review and sub­se­quent reori­en­ta­tion of OKRs for 2015. An inten­sive exer­cise, but seri­ous­ly worth it. The tech­nique helps us build learn­ing into our tiny organ­i­sa­tion, and that’s very valu­able. We’ll share some out­comes of this review in a sep­a­rate blog post soonish.

Look­ing ahead, we made good progress on a plan for Cam­parc Mark II, an improved ver­sion of our pub­lic space toy, which will debut at the STRP bien­nale. We expect to be ready to start pro­duc­tion on this baby with­in the next few weeks and will again be work­ing with the great Aldo Hoeben on it. Next to gen­er­al improve­ments we have a few cool new fea­tures lined up, so you might want to mark your cal­en­dars for the event and come over to Eind­hoven to play along.

On Thurs­day Alper and I head­ed to Fab­rique in Ams­ter­dam to talk to their team about our take on play­ful design, and hear about the impres­sive range of work they did for the Nation­al Mil­i­tary Muse­um. The sub­se­quent dis­cus­sions over drinks, about engage­ment, mod­el­ling game economies, and pro­to­typ­ing, were very enjoyable.

We also received the first print run of Bycatch this week, and had a lot of fun unpack­ing the ship­ment and admir­ing the qual­i­ty. This means we’re now ready to start ful­fill­ing the pre­orders we’ve received so far, as well as send out pre­view copies to select pub­li­ca­tions. I’m very excited—and a lit­tle apprehensive—about see­ing what peo­ple will write about our strange lit­tle game.

By chance, our friends at Play­ful pub­lished Sube­lakha’s talk about the design of Bycatch this week also. So you can go and have a look at that and hear about the ori­gins of the project and some of our design considerations.

Oth­er than this, I con­tin­ued to work on the mock­ups for KLM, while Alper ran around and had lots of meet­ings with poten­tial new clients, friends and peers.

A sol­id week!