Engaging sleep mode

First of all, best wish­es for the new year.

Before look­ing ahead, a quick look back. 2015 was great for us. In our end-of-year review of 2014 we said we want­ed to bal­ance cre­ative suc­cess with more com­mer­cial suc­cess. And we did. Busi­ness was good in 2015. We did much more con­sult­ing com­pared to the year before and we worked on one big pro­duc­tion project through­out the year. We also con­tin­ued to find time to con­tin­ue work on our own projects.

Not a bad place to start the new year, right? But after six years of run­ning Hub­bub we feel our con­fig­u­ra­tion as a bou­tique play­ful design agency and per­haps more impor­tant­ly the frames of ‘seri­ous games’ and ‘gam­i­fi­ca­tion’ have out­lived their use­ful­ness. Para­dox­i­cal­ly ‘games’ itself feels averse to our main inter­est: the role of play in the design of humane technology.

After some soul-search­ing we have decid­ed to sig­nif­i­cant­ly scale back our day-to-day invest­ment in the organ­i­sa­tion. Effec­tive­ly this means Hub­bub is going into hiber­na­tion for the fore­see­able future. We won’t take on new engage­ments in 2016. It goes with­out say­ing we will be hon­our­ing our pri­or com­mit­ments to clients and we will con­tin­ue to pro­mote and sell our own prod­ucts Bycatch and Cup­pings.

But the prin­ci­pals, that is to say me and Alper are free to pur­sue oth­er paths. Alper has joined Research­Gate in Berlin as a soft­ware engi­neer. Kars is spend­ing half a year in Sin­ga­pore and has returned to free­lance consulting.

We look back with great fond­ness on these past six years and are proud of all the work we have done. We are grate­ful to all the peo­ple who put their trust in us as clients and to all the peo­ple who chose to col­lab­o­rate with us. The core of Hub­bub may have remained tiny through­out the years but the cir­cle of tal­ent­ed indi­vid­u­als who became part of our net­work has con­tin­u­ous­ly grown and remains its great­est asset. A big thank you to every­one involved.

And final­ly our thanks to you dear read­er for join­ing us on our jour­ney for how­ev­er long it has been. Here’s to new begin­nings in 2016.