Month: February 2009

Alper reports on the Q&A ses­sions at This hap­pened – Utrecht #2. We asked him to do this, and I must say I am not dis­ap­point­ed with the result. This post is a good reflec­tion of what was dis­cussed dur­ing the evening. (In Dutch.)

“Find me a sin­gle pro­fes­sion, no mat­ter how old, that doesn’t have these same vari­a­tions, ten­sions and spec­trums of inter­est or philo­soph­i­cal approach. If it’s a liv­ing, thriv­ing pro­fes­sion, it’ll have all these things. It’s just that some have been around long enough to have a rei­fied image of sta­sis.” Few pro­lif­ic IAs that I know are as artic­u­late and lucid about the rela­tion­ships between user expe­ri­ence pro­fes­sion­als as Hin­ton is. The guy makes sense.

Tom reports on an idea float­ing around the S&W stu­dio – a ser­vice for ‘end­less note­books’. Makes me want to try my hand at some book­bind­ing myself…

Alper announces his atten­dance of the past This hap­pened – Utrecht #2. Soon he’ll post a sum­ma­ry of the Q&As (a lit­tle exper­i­ment we’re doing to see if we can up the qual­i­ty of the even­t’s doc­u­men­ta­tion even further).

Utrecht-based web agency Rhi­nofly reports on This hap­pened – Utrecht #2 (in Dutch): “Ik vond het een toffe en inspir­erende sessie. Een mix van mensen uit het veld, geves­tigde ontwer­pers, com­mer­ciële bedri­jven en stu­den­ten spreken open­lijk over hun meth­od­es en ideeën en zetten je aan het denken. Dus: vol­gende keer weer? Jazeker!”

One of the win­ning games at this year’s Glob­al Game Jam in NL. Pulse is a col­lab­o­ra­tive rhythm action game.

Chris exper­i­ments with using flight progress strips for to-do man­age­ment. Ever since read­ing about them in Where the Action Is I’ve been fas­ci­nat­ed with these things. Nice to final­ly see what they look like.

Iskan­der has post­ed a report of the sec­ond Dutch This hap­pened with­in hours of its cul­mi­na­tion. Crazy. Inter­est­ing­ly, he’s spot­ted a theme while we did not plan on hav­ing any. In Dutch.

“Topobo is the world’s first con­struc­tion toy with kinet­ic mem­o­ry, the abil­i­ty to record and play­back phys­i­cal motion.” An awe­some toy. Via Jerome.

“I hear there’s real wood­en fur­ni­ture, and paper books. You can have a lie down and read. / What’s a lie down? / Not sure, but I heard that’s what peo­ple did back then. / Crazy. / I can’t wait.” Alex switch­es from spec­u­la­tive mod­el­ling to spec­u­la­tive sto­ry­telling. Wonderful.

“The result is a high­ly dynam­ic over­lay of cur­rent con­di­tions, sound­ings and action poten­tials made explic­it and super­im­posed on the city — some­thing we might think of as net­work weath­er.” An out­line of sorts for Green­field­’s new book. Net­work weath­er, what a love­ly metaphor.

Lots to chew on in this post on loca­tion based ser­vices by Matt Jones. I think pre­dic­tive mod­el­ling of the future using past loca­tion data is an inter­est­ing avenue of explo­ration. The hard­est prob­lem, as far as I’m con­cerned, is how to com­mu­ni­cate the ambi­gu­i­ty and poten­tial mul­ti­plic­i­ty of said future in visualizations?

A brief dis­cus­sion of This hap­pened in Dutch. Main­ly focussed on the DIY / grass roots nature of the events and the fact that it is sup­port­ed by cheap and / or free online tools.

My friends at Tinker.it! are mak­ing pro­to­typ­ing for phys­i­cal com­put­ing even sim­pler with Tin­kerK­it: “Tin­kerK­it is an Arduino-com­pat­i­ble phys­i­cal com­put­ing pro­to­typ­ing toolk­it aimed at design professionals.”

MIMOA announces their appear­ance at This hap­pened – Utrecht #2. Look­ing for­ward to their talk.

A short talk by Kevin Slavin at MIND08, about break­ing machines “not to escape real­i­ty, but to make real­i­ty big­ger … to evoke in stead of inform … not to ground us fur­ther, but to keep us fur­ther on our toes”.