Week 284

A large chunk of my time this week was tak­en up with con­tribut­ing to E-Motive Day, a con­fer­ence organ­ised by an inter­na­tion­al net­work of organ­i­sa­tions work­ing on social change of var­i­ous kinds. We were asked to demo Stand­ing, and talk about our per­spec­tive on play­ful design for activism. Peo­ple said nice things about both and I had inter­est­ing con­ver­sa­tions about a sub­ject that I hold dear.

There were good talks from oth­ers too. I was par­tic­u­lar­ly tak­en with the work being done by CEW-IT in Ugan­da to empow­er cit­i­zens, Emer Beam­er’s efforts to reimag­ine pri­ma­ry edu­ca­tion as design edu­ca­tion, and Lino Hellings’s pho­to walk method­ol­o­gy devel­oped at PAPA.

Mean­while, work on KUMA con­tin­ued apace. I went over to KLM to review sto­ry­boards, and hand­ed over feed­back to Tim for a first ver­sion of mock­ups. It’s been a plea­sure to see the first few of those roll by in Drop­box already.

Final­ly, I pre­pared two upcom­ing work­shops. One is togeth­er with Jeroen for Beren­schot, about using adven­ture games to increase aware­ness of integri­ty issues in the work­place. The chal­lenge here is to design gen­uine moral chal­lenges for play­ers, in stead of obvi­ous right/wrong choic­es.

The oth­er is for a group of exhi­bi­tion design stu­dents at Rein­wardt Acad­e­my, about play­ful design. The plan is to have them remix a famous Peg­gy Guggen­heim exhi­bi­tion and make a playable scale mod­el of their plan. Should be fun.

We also con­tin­ued to do mar­ket­ing on Bycatch. And as we sol­diered on this week, we were occa­sion­al­ly delight­ed by a mes­sages from play­ers shar­ing their expe­ri­ences with the game.

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