Month: December 2008

links for 2008-12-30

Cities, systems, literacy, games

If you were asked to improve your own neigh­bour­hood, what would you change? And how would you go about com­mu­ni­cat­ing those changes? 

Cities are sys­tems, or rather, many sys­tems that inter­con­nect. Like build­ings, they can be thought of as hav­ing lay­ers, each chang­ing at its own pace. If those lay­ers are loose­ly cou­pled, the city — like the build­ing — can adapt.

Recent­ly, new urban layers/systems have start­ed to emerge. They are made up of rapid­ly pro­lif­er­at­ing com­put­ing pow­er, car­ried by peo­ple and embed­ded in the envi­ron­ment, used to access vast amounts of data.

…

At the same time, games have giv­en rise to a new form of lit­er­a­cy — sys­temic lit­er­a­cy. How­ev­er, to date, play­ers have most­ly inhab­it­ed the sys­tems that make up games. They can read them. Writ­ing, on the oth­er hand, is anoth­er mat­ter. True sys­temic lit­er­a­cy means being able to change the sys­tems you inhabit.

True read/write sys­temic lit­er­a­cy can be used to craft games, yes. But it can also be used to see that many oth­er prob­lems and chal­lenges in dai­ly life are sys­temic ones. 

To be sure, the real-time city will con­front its inhab­i­tants with many new prob­lems. It is of the essence that the peo­ple shap­ing these new sys­tems have a deep con­cern for their fel­low humans. But it is also at least as impor­tant that peo­ple are taught the knowl­edge and skills — and giv­en the tools — to change stuff about their sur­round­ings as they see fit.

The won­der­ful thing is, we can shape sys­tems, using the ‘new’ streets as a plat­form that trans­fer this knowl­edge and these skills to peo­ple. We can cre­ate ‘seri­ous’ urban games that facil­i­tate spec­u­la­tive mod­el­ling, so that peo­ple can improve their liv­ing envi­ron­ment, or at least express what they would change about it, in a play­ful way.

links for 2008-12-22

links for 2008-12-20

links for 2008-12-17

What I’ve been up to lately

You might be won­der­ing what’s been going on at the Leapfrog stu­dio late­ly, since I haven’t real­ly post­ed any­thing sub­stan­tial here in a while. Quite some stuff has hap­pened — and I’ll hope­ful­ly get back into post­ing longer arti­cles soon — but for now, here’s a list of more or less inter­est­ing things I have been doing:

This hap­pened – Utrecht

We had our first This hap­pened – Utrecht on Novem­ber 3. I think we suc­ceed­ed in cre­at­ing an event that real­ly looks at the craft of inter­ac­tion design. I’m hap­py to say we’re plan­ning to do three events next year — all at The­ater Kikker in Utrecht — and we’ve got lots of cool speak­ers in mind. If you want to make sure you won’t miss them, sub­scribe to our newslet­ter (in Dutch).1

Teach­ing

My stu­dents are near­ing the end of their project. They’ve been hard at work cre­at­ing con­cepts for mobile social games with a musi­cal com­po­nent; they came up with 20 in total. Now they’re pro­to­typ­ing two of them, and I must say it’s look­ing good. They’ll have to present the games to the project’s com­mis­sion­er — a major mobile phone man­u­fac­tur­er — some­where the begin­ning of Jan­u­ary 2009. I hope to be able to share some of the results here afterwards.

Office space

Since Decem­ber 1 I am a res­i­dent of the Dutch Game Gar­den’s Busi­ness Club. That means I now have a nice office smack in the cen­tre of Utrecht. The building’s home to lots of won­der­ful games com­pa­nies, some, like me, oper­at­ing on the fringes — like Fource­Labs and Monoban­da. If you’re curi­ous and would like to drop by for a tour, a cof­fee and some con­ver­sa­tion, let me know.

Brain­storm

I was invit­ed do help com­pose one of the cas­es for the ‘Grote Ams­ter­damse Water­brain­wave’. A one-day brain­storm in which 45 stu­dents from var­i­ous insti­tu­tions were asked to come up with water-relat­ed inno­va­tions that would make the Nether­lands a sig­nif­i­cant glob­al play­er once again. It was organ­ised by the Port of Ams­ter­dam, Water­net and Verleden van Ned­er­land2. I also attend­ed the day itself as an out­side expert on games and the cre­ative indus­try in gen­er­al. Read a report of the event at FD.nl (in Dutch).

Book

Dan Saf­fer’s book Design­ing Ges­tur­al Inter­faces has been pub­lished by O’Reilly and is now avail­able. Turn to page 109 and you’ll find a sto­ry­board by yours tru­ly used for illus­tra­tion pur­pos­es. That’s the first time any work of mine is fea­tured in print, so nat­u­ral­ly I’m quite proud. I have yet to receive my copy, but got a sneak peek this week­end and I must say it looks promis­ing. If you’re a design­er need­ing to get up to speed with mul­ti-touch, phys­i­cal com­put­ing and such, this should be a good place to start.

That’s about it for now. There’s a lot of excit­ing stuff in the works, the out­comes of which I will hope­ful­ly be able to share with you in 2009. 

  1. The cre­ators of This hap­pened in Lon­don have been nom­i­nat­ed for a best of the year award by the Design Muse­um, by the way. Well-deserved, I would say! [↩]
  2. A cross-media cam­paign aimed at increas­ing aware­ness of Dutch nation­al his­to­ry. [↩]

links for 2008-12-12