What the hubbub is

There’s some move­ment over at the web­site for my new ven­ture. I men­tioned Hub­bub before: it is a design stu­dio I am set­ting up for phys­i­cal, social games that are played in pub­lic places. We hope to address social issues and the like using these games.

Recent­ly…

Today's harvest

Also, we’ll be doing some­thing play­ful and run­ning a work­shop at the upcom­ing Game in the City con­fer­ence in Amersfoort. 

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links for 2009-10-28

  • Bleeck­er and Nova argue for an alter­na­tive to the syn­chro­nous, real-time city. I can def­i­nite­ly get behind the idea that there is more to city expe­ri­ence than the hygien­ic, com­pu­ta­tion­al mod­el that is cur­rent­ly being imposed by tech­nol­o­gists. Also, the exam­ples they show from their own prac­tice are inspir­ing works that demon­strate the val­ue of think­ing through making.
  • An inter­est­ing take by urban­ists on urban games: “The big issue of urban games is the sud­den appear­ance of unex­pect­ed actions with­in an urban con­text. The pub­lic space is reset and rein­ter­pret­ed as a play­ground for adults. The dis­turb­ing role that those games have on ‘nor­mal’ space use, seems to be the main pur­pose. In the con­text of the flex­i­ble city the games show the need of anoth­er per­cep­tion of space. Organ­is­ers must be sick of for­mal city forms and leg­isla­tive terms of use. The city has to become fun again, not as a play­ing field for civ­il ser­vants mak­ing plans, but for peo­ple using it.” The whole blog seems worth fol­low­ing actu­al­ly, if you’re inter­est­ed in new forms of city planning.
  • A Dutch arti­cle on the state of the seri­ous games indus­try. A pret­ty decent overview, with just a few minor inac­cu­ra­cies: Sur­geons who prac­tice using Trau­ma Cen­ter on the Wii? Not like­ly. Also, it’s a shame the researcher of TU Delft who is quot­ed says games need to have appeal­ing visu­al design, but neglects to men­tion the impor­tance of prop­er game play design…

links for 2009-10-19

links for 2009-10-16

  • Although I see a lot to agree with here (pro­vid­ing access to city data is a good thing). I can’t help but wince at the tech­no-opti­mism ooz­ing from this piece. The author seems to think the aver­age cit­i­zen is flu­ent in data­ma­nip­u­la­tion. Geeks are also flock­ing to this city as a plat­form stuff because it’s shiny new tech. But they’re for­get­ting about all the mun­dane infra­struc­tures reg­u­lar peo­ple are already deal­ing with, and need help with, which the tech­no-elite have for­got­ten about, since, well, it’s got­ten bored with it.

links for 2009-10-13

  • An inter­est­ing site (thanks Iskan­der), very much relat­ed to my ideas on using urban games to cre­ate pos­i­tive effects in pub­lic space. The tagline though, is mis­lead­ing: “some­thing as sim­ple as fun is the eas­i­est way to change people’s behav­iour for the bet­ter”. Beyond gim­micks, fun is nei­ther a sim­ple con­cept to under­stand, nor a sim­ple expe­ri­ence to bring about.