Hubbub has gone into hibernation.

Tag Archives: urbanism

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 […]

Posted in Featured, Talks, Thoughts | Also tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments closed

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 […]

Posted in Thoughts | Also tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments closed

Week 191

Last week was the penul­ti­mate pro­duc­tion week for KAIGARA dur­ing which I was present at the Utrecht stu­dio for three days for the very essen­tial face­time that can­not be replaced by Apple’s Face­Time even though it does come close. Tues­day was a full day of work with the entire team at the Hub­bub stu­dio helmed by […]

Posted in Weeknotes | Also tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments closed

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 […]

Posted in Projects | Also tagged , , , , , , , | Comments closed

Ignite Berlin on New Games and Wild Play

Before I went on my trip to Chi­na and Aus­tralia I had an Ignite to give here in Berlin. To do that I threw all of our think­ing of the past cou­ple of years on the floor (lit­er­al­ly because my post-its would­n’t stick to the wall behind me) and syn­the­sized it into some­thing that reflects […]

Posted in Talks | Also tagged , , , , , , , | Comments closed

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 […]

Posted in Articles | Also tagged , , , , , | Comments closed

New Games for New Cities at FutureEverything

Last week I was in Man­ches­ter for FutureEv­ery­thing. I pre­sent­ed on games and how they can be used to improve city life. Below are my notes and a selec­tion of slides. It’s longish, but hope­ful­ly infor­ma­tive. I’ve tried to con­nect crit­i­cism of gam­i­fi­ca­tion with the virtues of open-end­ed play, and show how the lat­ter can […]

Posted in Talks | Also tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments closed

Human desire in the cognitive city

As I write this I am on a train to Utrecht, the last leg of my jour­ney home from Berlin. I was there for Cog­ni­tive Cities, a con­fer­ence on urban com­put­ing, data visu­al­iza­tion and relat­ed sub­jects. It’s been a hell of a week­end — a few minor flaws aside, the con­fer­ence was great and I […]

Posted in Articles | Also tagged , , , | Comments closed

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 […]

Posted in Talks | Also tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments closed

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 […]

Posted in Talks | Also tagged , , , , , , , | Comments closed