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A look behind the scenes of the Christmas decorations generated from data that RIG has made for their friends.
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“Folded correctly, the maps reveal how Stewart breaks the margins of the map to travel, invisibly, through space and time.” James Bridle on the newspaper he created about Walking Stewart.
Month: December 2009
links for 2009-12-19
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Photos of shopping malls fallen into disuse. This should serve as a nice example of adaptive design, city diversity and non-places at some point.
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It’s like a modern-day Hobbit shire. A very cool home.
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“The new technique developed by computer scientist Jack van Wijk at the Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands uses algorithms to ‘unfold’ and cut into the Earth’s surface in a way that minimizes distortion, and keeps the distracting effect of cutting into the map to a minimum.” Pretty, pretty maps.
links for 2009-12-18
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Congratulations to my friends at 31Volts for writing the first Dutch service design book. Can’t wait to leaf through a copy, soon.
links for 2009-12-17
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Adrian argues the BBC should finally get serious about making games, or risk becoming irrelevant. From recent experiences (although mine do not run as deep as Adrian’s) I would say the same largely holds true for the Netherlands.
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Congratulations to Nicolas et al. for launching their research and consulting agency. I know Nicolas has been doing very interesting research work for games companies. Check him out.
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What I like most about this concept video for a digital magazine is how some of the design rationale is explained through interactions with wireframe-like animations. This video also just looks really nice. Something probably to do with Timo Arnall’s involvement.
links for 2009-12-16
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Interesting visualization of the growth of Utrecht, my hometown. The jump between the 60s and 80s is startling.
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“The broader point I’m trying to argue is that, as an interaction designer, your thinking about touchscreens, object models, APIs or task flows will be perceptibly improved by even a slight acquaintance with other, non-digital modes of design for human experience.” For what it’s worth, I’ve personally found this to be so true.
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As if my list of books to read isn’t long enough already.
links for 2009-12-11
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Steal this competition entry! Brilliant move by the guys at 31Volts: they’ve published their entry into a local competition under a CC license. Prize money of up to € 15.000 is available for the most innovative, sustainable project idea. Their idea is pretty cool too: a design agency that is part of the municipality, aimed at tackling abstract problems with design methods.
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James and Tijs update us about the current state of affairs with their social web app for art lovers. The way they’re open about both the good and the bad is something you don’t see too often. Refreshing.
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“…absolutely everyone I heard speak about or pitch ARGs seems to approach them as a narrative form. […] It’s not about taking TV and print skills into new media, it’s about taking game and interaction design skills out into all media.” A good description of some of the things the ARG scene struggles with at the moment.
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A wiki where Staffan Björk is redeveloping the patterns he created together with Jussi Holopainen for the Game Design Patterns book. Hypertext seems a good fit for their sprawling work.
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A series of urban games developed by The Patching Zone; a “transdisciplinary praxis laboratory for innovation”. These are played in Rotterdam and employ sidewalk tiles expanded with sensors and LEDs.
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A news ticker for your feeds. Far too obtrusive for my liking, but then I have all notifications on my system turned off.
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Something like a Last.fm for blogs. This service uses a Firefox plugin to track what you’ve been looking at and generates a list of most read blogs that you can show as a blogroll. Interesting.
links for 2009-12-08
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“The 24 comprises a live electronic display in the public site of a bus shelter on which a text unfolds each day, spanning a period of twenty-four hours. The work develops at the rate of one phrase per minute, totaling 1440 phrases, each describing imagined sounds, events, sights and conversations from a city, shifting in mood and content as each day progresses to night. […] At night, between midnight and 6am, the writing is manipulated live by a computer program that creates new combinations of action, image and event from the existing text — a sampling and remixing process that produces increasingly poetical, unlikely and unsettling possibilities.”
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Digging up old stuff by Russel and Chris and Adam about screens for a workshop I’m working on. I particularly like what Russel has to say about the dangers of the proliferation of glowing rectangles in urban space: “My concern is that we’ll end up blundering into cities plastered with the equivalent of flash banners and microsites. […] and half of me suspects we’re going to end up with Blade Runner directed by the people who brought you Orangina and Cillit Bang.”
links for 2009-12-04
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The Lift10 brand design looks sweet. The theme is a welcome one too. I can do with some humanism in these techno-fetishistic times.
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(Dutch) “Overal kunnen komen. Alles kunnen doen.” Apparently, a massive accessibility effort is afoot in NL. Wonder if they’ll go as far as to look at games.
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Such a curious job: designing user interfaces for cinema. What’s most interesting is that, for better or for worse, designers of real-world interfaces look to cinema (particularly sci-fi) for inspiration, even though these designs are more about visual drama than usability.
Jane Jacobs and London’s Old Street area
I’ve been reading The Death and Life of Great American Cities at a leisurely pace since october or so. (A tempo that seems to suit the book fine. Jacobs makes me want to slow down and see.) I came across this passage during a session with the book this weekend and something about a recent visit to London clicked.
After explaining how large companies do not need to be in cities because they are to a large extent self-sufficient and thus do not have to rely on services outside themselves, Jacobs goes on to say:
“But for small manufacturers, everything is reversed. Typically they must draw on many and varied supplies and skills outside themselves, they must serve a narrow market at the point where a market exists, and they must be sensitive to quick changes in this market. Without cities, they would simply not exist. Dependent on a huge diversity of other city enterprises, they can add further to that diversity. This last is a most important point to remember. City diversity itself permits and stimulates more diversity.”
(My emphasis, by the way.)
The day before Playful ’09 I spent some time at BERG, Tinker.it! and Really Interesting Group. Nothing fancy mind you. I mean, they lent me a chair and a bit of table, plus internet. It wasn’t like I actually worked with them (although I’m sure I would enjoy it!) It was a nice experience, but most of all, it was humbling. I was struck by the spareness of the space they were in, the limited facilities at their disposal, the little room they had for all the people present.
Let me just say it was as little or less than what I’ve seen comparable groups in the Netherlands have to make do with.
And this is the thing. Over here, many of the startups I’ve encountered seem to believe they first need more and fancier facilities before they can make it big time. The Silicon Roundabout crew I mentioned earlier make a global splash at a regular basis, despite the limited (that I observed) resources at their disposal.
However, and this is where the quote from Death and Life comes in, perhaps I was looking at it the wrong way. Perhaps the Shoreditch startups are more effective than their Dutch counterparts not just because they do more with less (and because they are, clearly, insanely talented and hard working, “riding the wave of innovation, 24/7”, right guys?) but because they are in London. A city at a different scale than Amsterdam or for that matter the greater Amsterdam area, the Randstad as we call it around these parts. A city with a more diverse ecosystem of services and things, smaller services, more specialised services, ready to be employed by companies like BERG and RIG and Tinker, enhancing their abilities when needed.
The city, in this case, not as a battle suit, but more like a huge drug store stocked with a huge range of pharmaceuticals that augment then this trait, then the other.
links for 2009-12-03
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A report (in Dutch) of the session I ran with Dan and Adrian Hon of Six to Start, at NPOX 09. We had one hour to show producers of drama what the potential of games and play are. Dan showed a lot of examples and talked about what works and what doesn’t. I moderated a Q&A session around a real-world case presented by a local TV producer and we wrapped up with some best practices for participants to take home.