Design for a Playful World

This was the first week after my hol­i­day so I spent Mon­day most­ly just get­ting back into things. A process that used to be quite painful but ever since we most­ly run on a com­bi­na­tion of Asana and Slack it is much eas­i­er to get a sense of what has hap­pened and what needs to be done com­pared to the old email days.

My post-hol­i­day blues were soft­ened by the com­pa­ny of Tom, who had been in the coun­try for a few days. As always, it was a plea­sure catch­ing up, see­ing what he’s been work­ing on and shar­ing our own work. We wrapped up with lunch at De Klub, after which Tom went on to explore Utrecht before his flight back to Lon­don.

The rest of the week I focused on Cam­parc. On Tues­day I had a week­ly sta­tus update call with STRP after which I drove down to Aldo’s stu­dio in Rot­ter­dam. There I had the great plea­sure to play with the pro­to­type cam­era ball he’s been build­ing. See­ing it live for the first time made a big impres­sion. The ball is seri­ous­ly big and unex­pect­ed­ly heavy. Watch­ing the gyro inside of it move around as you play with the ball is mes­meris­ing. See­ing the panoram­ic footage stream live as you move around is a bit mag­i­cal. For me it was def­i­nite con­fir­ma­tion we are on the right track.

Dur­ing the rest of the week I delved into all aspects of Cam­par­c’s pro­duc­tion, as there are quite a few things that remained to be deter­mined and arranged. Most notably I had a meet­ing with Tru­do, who are the devel­op­ers of Strijp‑S, which is the area where Cam­parc will be played. I shared our work in progress, got enthu­si­as­tic respons­es and we imme­di­ate­ly set out to sketch out the exact loca­tions where we will be play­ing on the week­end of the event the game is part of (Sep­tem­ber 12–14).

On Fri­day, I reviewed our progress with Aldo and made plans for the next week in which every­thing will come togeth­er for the beta ver­sion of the cam­era ball, includ­ing cus­tom, bright­ly coloured 3D print­ed con­nect­ing mate­ri­als. I also went over the cur­rent state of affairs with STRP again, pin­ning down some details of the even­t’s time table.

Aside from Cam­parc, I put some prepa­ra­tions into our upcom­ing project with KLM, and a grant appli­ca­tion for a new col­lab­o­ra­tion relat­ed to urban plan­ning. I closed the week off in style with Fri­day drinks and very nice din­ner at De Klub.