My Mobile Game Directions Pecha Kucha

Yes­ter­day I pre­sent­ed my talk on mobile gam­ing at the 6th Pecha Kucha Night in Rotterdam’s Off_Corso. I was pro­grammed as the first speak­er, which was excit­ing (and also allowed me to ben­e­fit from the pri­ma­cy effect, as my girl­friend point­ed out). Col­league Iskan­der was kind enough to record the whole thing on his N70 (fit­ting­ly) and I present it here for your enjoy­ment or aggra­va­tion, whichev­er you pre­fer (please take note that the talk is in Dutch). The slides I used are over at SlideShare.

I’m still not sure the sub­ject mat­ter was appro­pri­ate for the event, con­sid­er­ing the major­i­ty of speak­ers were either graph­ic design­ers, autonomous artists or archi­tects. The crowd might’ve been a bit under­whelmed by my com­mer­cial and pop cul­tur­al ref­er­ences. Oh well, I had fun, I guess that’s the most impor­tant thing. 

Many thanks to Nadine and Bart of Hunk Design for let­ting me loose on stage. ‘Nuff respect to all the pre­sen­ters for tak­ing the trou­ble of prepar­ing a pre­sen­ta­tion. There were plen­ty of cool and inspir­ing ideas on show. Final­ly, thanks to the cre­ators of all the images I used, you can find the cred­its in the SlideShare show.

Update: I’ve delet­ed my YouTube account so here’s an embed of the video on Vimeo:



Mobile Game Direc­tions @ Pecha Kucha Night Rot­ter­dam from Kaeru on Vimeo.

Where are the good European IxD schools?

Dan Saf­fer of Adap­tive Path wrote an intro­duc­to­ry piece for bud­ding inter­ac­tion design­ers. Five years ago, Robert Reimann of Coop­er did the same. Both are nice overviews for novices and espe­cial­ly the parts on a designer’s tem­pera­ment are enter­tain­ing to read. 

Saf­fer fails to men­tion any good IxD schools out­side of the US and UK. Which is a shame for all of us Euro­pean design­ers. Reimann men­tioned Ivrea’s now defunct IxD institute.

I’d like to start by point­ing to my coura­geous lit­tle country’s Utrecht School of Arts, which has been teach­ing IxD for 15 years now (!) and today offers both BA and MA pro­grams. They’ve recent­ly branched off into game design, which has been quite successful.

Full dis­clo­sure: I was a stu­dent at the same school from 1998 – 2001 (BA IxD, MA Game Design) and am now teach­ing a course in mobile game design.

Any oth­er good IxD schools in Europe that you know of?

Update: dis­cus­sions on Saf­fer­’s post on the IxDA’s mal­ing list here and here; overview of IxD edu­ca­tion (most­ly in the US) here.

Signals from the Leapfrog offices

Or in oth­er words, what I’ve been up to, besides keep­ing myself busy over at Info.nl.

  1. Reboot 8 is shap­ing up to be anoth­er great con­fer­ence. I’m already look­ing for­ward to see­ing Matt Webb and Chris Heath­cote speak, among oth­ers. I’m also still think­ing about doing some­thing myself, the ques­tion is: what? 
  2. While we’re on the top­ic of con­fer­ences, make sure you don’t miss The Web and Beyond — the 10th annu­al SIGCHI.NL event. I’ve been help­ing with the organ­i­sa­tion and must say it’s promis­ing to be an inter­est­ing look at the web 2.0 phe­nom­e­non from an inter­ac­tion design perspective. 
  3. I have a heap of arti­cles and posts lying around wait­ing to be fed to my del.icio.us account (I actu­al­ly read all that stuff before both­er­ing you with it). Now to just find the time to tag them all – to think this stuff is sup­posed to have a low cog­ni­tive load! 
  4. Right after vis­it­ing Reboot 8 I’ll be off to beau­ti­ful Italy for some much need­ed R&R. Be sure to keep an eye on my Flickr pho­to­stream for slight­ly crap­py cam­er­a­phone shots of Napels, Rome, Flo­rence and Venice. Look­ing for­ward to that! 
  5. Final­ly, you may have won­dered about the “mar­tial arts enthu­si­ast” bit in this blog’s intro­duc­tion. Between all of the above I’m get­ting myself ready for some exam­i­na­tions in Take­da Ryu this sum­mer. When I get back from Vien­na, I hope to be a cer­ti­fied teacher’s assis­tant and sec­ond dan in Aiki­do. Wish me luck.
Now back to our reg­u­lar pro­gram­ming – death­ly silence while I get some more client work out the door.

Thinking about IxD patterns

Hav­ing just post­ed about a new pat­tern library; my mind has been occu­pied a bit by the role of pat­terns in design. I’ve noticed that for a lot of IxD prob­lems, I tend to first try to tack­le the issue myself. Then, I usu­al­ly refer to some exam­ples and / or pat­terns, to see if I’ve missed any obvi­ous caveats. After that, I usu­al­ly fine-tune the solu­tion. What I like about pat­terns is that they give a clear out­line of the most com­mon way of han­dling a giv­en prob­lem. I do think that they’ll nev­er be a replace­ment for some gen­uine inspired design – stuff that no one has come up with before. I doubt we’ll ever see the day when inter­ac­tion design­ers will be replaced by a huge pat­tern library…

Yahoo! opens up some more

Some great new resources are now avail­able, cour­tesy of every­one’s favorite web 2.0 com­pa­ny: Yahoo!

The Design Pat­tern Library con­tains a whole bunch of pat­ters for user inter­face design­ers to use and abuse. Mar­ti­jn van Welie final­ly has some competition.

Of more inter­est to devel­op­ers is the UI Library, con­tain­ing “a set of util­i­ties and con­trols, writ­ten in JavaScript, for build­ing rich­ly inter­ac­tive web appli­ca­tions”. These code exam­ples are fre­quent­ly linked to from the pat­tern library.

I must say, these look like some excel­lent addi­tions to the cur­rent body of knowl­edge avail­able to design­ers and devel­op­ers. Thanks a bunch Yahoo!

How­ev­er, my para­noid mind can’t help but think: what’s the catch?

Via Jere­my Zawod­ny.