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Tag Archives: architecture

Week 320

This week was a change of pace from the few qui­et ones pre­ced­ing it: plen­ty of meet­ings, work ses­sions and events with project work pick­ing up again as well. On Tues­day, I head­ed to Nijmegen to close off project KOKORO with the client. KOKORO is a dig­i­tal coach for ado­les­cent men­tal health. We reviewed the final […]

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New Planning Methods

This is a write­up of my talk at the event ‘Nieuwe Plan­ningsmeth­o­d­en’ (‘New Plan­ning Meth­ods’) in Pakhuis de Zwi­jger, Ams­ter­dam on Octo­ber 8, 2015. Hel­lo. My name is Kars Alfrink. I am a design­er and part­ner at Hub­bub, a small play­ful design agency, based in Utrecht and Berlin. Hub­bub helps organ­i­sa­tions do things with games, play […]

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The Gameful City, a preview of my chapter for The Gameful World

This year, MIT Press will pub­lish The Game­ful World, a book edit­ed by Stef­fen P. Walz and Sebas­t­ian Deter­d­ing to which I’ve con­tributed a chap­ter. The book will cov­er approach­es in game­ful and play­ful design, how it can be applied to a range of fields and its com­mon issues. For exam­ple, Ian Bogost will expand […]

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Q&A with Studio Papaver about their collective intelligence game for population shrinkage

Anne and Zineb of Stu­dio Papaver got in touch with me towards the end of last year, ask­ing if I would advise them on a project they were start­ing at the Stu­dio for Unso­licit­ed Archi­tec­ture. They were work­ing on the prob­lem of pop­u­la­tion shrink­age, and they were think­ing of mak­ing a game. Archi­tects mak­ing games—as […]

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Six games about architecture

I went look­ing for a few recent exam­ples of games that deal with archi­tec­tur­al themes in some way. I pulled these most­ly from a few of the major street games fes­ti­vals that are out there, such as Come Out & Play, Hide & Seek, Igfest and You Are GO! Just from this small sam­ple size it […]

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Pools connected to playgrounds

I am pre­oc­cu­pied by the ways play and games con­nect to the phys­i­cal form of cities. Here’s one way to look at it: archi­tects are influ­enced by the sur­pris­ing new uses of exist­ing con­struc­tions. For exam­ple, there’s a con­nec­tion between a swim­ming pool like this one… Pho­to (cc) Mallix …and this play­ground designed by Carve for […]

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“New ideas must use old buildings”

The oth­er day I had din­ner at a radio-sta­­tion that was turned into a restau­rant. My favorite events venue in Ams­ter­dam used to be a print­ing press. And friends of mine are turn­ing a mas­sive sports hall into cre­ative work spaces. The uses build­ings were intend­ed for, and what they’re actu­al­ly used for, vary greatly. […]

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Slides and notes for ‘Limits of the Imaginable’ – a lecture on the future of applied game design

Last week I found myself in the gor­geous sur­round­ings of the Roy­al Dutch Acad­e­my of Sci­ences (KNAW) to talk about my views on the future of applied game design at an expert meet­ing orga­nized by the Nether­lands Study Cen­tre for Tech­nol­o­gy Trends (STT). I was one of four speak­ers, the oth­ers being David Shaf­fer, Jeroen […]

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Slides and notes for ‘The City Is My Games Console’ at CIID

A few weeks ago I had the plea­sure of doing an open lec­ture at CIID; the Copen­hagen Insti­tute for Inter­ac­tion Design. Below you’ll find a selec­tion of the slides I used, plus a rough tran­script of what I said.1 Not includ­ed is arguably the most fun part of the after­noon, which was a playtest of […]

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A few predictions for the future of urban games

On Wednes­day 14 April I co-host­ed the first Best Scene in Town work­shop on invi­ta­tion of Waag Soci­ety’s Ronald Lenz. The oth­er co-host was The Mobile City’s Mar­ti­jn de Waal. Best Scene in Town is a design con­test where­in par­tic­i­pants are asked to cre­ate an urban game, nar­ra­tive expe­ri­ence or tour using 7scenes; Waag Soci­ety’s […]

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