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“…the most fundamental acts of design are essentially a combination of talent and practice. Like a sport or a musical instrument – performance, not process…” Of interest mainly because I am looking for new ways to frame design for students and trainees. Methods in stead of processes might be a helpful approach.
Author: Kars Alfrink
Designer turned design researcher. Postdoc at TU Delft. Exploring contestable AI.
links for 2010-11-09
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“If it’s true that more than half the world’s people organize themselves in cities, then it’s our responsibility to understand and pay attention to the wild and unmanaged plants that grow up all around us.” Curious discussion of the need to reconsider the way we perceive weeds or invasive species.
links for 2010-11-08
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“…our economic and social ‘adjacent possible’ appears to now include complete economies and social structures delivered as software service…” Since I am desperately looking for ways we might reinvent how we measure value, this is of some interest. Via Alper.
links for 2010-11-07
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“It’s a tool to help you do something. That notion led to the thought that mechanically-realised stories – the kind that movies can’t really ever tell, and the kind that games are invariably best at – are a kind of narrative exoskeleton.” Games as tools instead of media, that’s what it’s all about.
links for 2010-11-05
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“We need to question any ”reality that presents itself as natural”and that includes something as apparently innocuous as Google.” An examination of the rhetoric underlying Google’s seamingly neutral tech, and the new frontier of politics that is the internets.
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Mostly of interest for its account of the game’s origins.
Week 176
As I was starting to write this a discussion broke out on dramaturgy and game design. So I got sidetracked debating similarities and differences between disciplines and most importantly what they have to offer to each other. The room was filled with interaction designers, game designers and folk with a theatre background.1 So that was interesting.
More mixing of disciplines: on tuesday I spent a day working on Buta with Irene van Peer, a product designer with a tremendous amount of experience in the healthcare domain. We sat down and managed to push the work forward through lots of sketching and making. Next up is more work with pigs and farmers on site.
The rest of this week was taken up by work for PLAY Pilots (Monobanda’s Bandjesland for Le Guess Who? is turning out great), the Pampus project at the HKU, and a few meetings for new projects on the horizon.
I have been paying attention to my calory intake the past few weeks. It turned out this was far too low. Now that I am eating much more I find myself being able to cope with less sleep, more stress and just generally feeling much better. Which also makes for more pleasure taken from my work. Who’d have thought food could be such an upper?
- Wieger and Sylvan, interns at Hubbub, study Design for Virtual Theatre and Games at the HKU. [↩]
links for 2010-11-04
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“…the idea of appropriate technology and alternative design: that needs to come back big time.” An interview with Kim Stanley Robinson in which (among many things) the follies of current thinking on ‘sustainable’ technology.
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“There’s this idea that they are the agents of change, the true revolutionaries, where the revolutionary change is to … make exclusive the pleasures that had potentially belonged to anyone in the past, to celebrate the upwards redistribution of wealth.” A description of the origins of the hipster, as well as thoughts on why they elicit as much hatred as they do. I am probably a little guilty of this behaviour myself at times.
links for 2010-10-31
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This essay argues that 4chan’s /b/ is a prime example of a new form of art some call relational aesthetics. I found the examination of the mARBLE CAKE ALSO THE GAME raid to be the most interesting part, reminding me of the ludic happenings of the 50ies, but on steroids.
Week 175
This week, a large chunk of my time was taken up by the return of project Maguro. A few weeks ago, I think it was number 171, we (a team of freelance consultants put together by Demovides) presented our concept. It turns out the client liked this concept so much, they actually want it produced, pronto. Demovides has asked Hubbub to take care of all creative work, which is great. I’ve been planning the project, together with the other folks driving it, and figuring out budgets and deadlines and deliverables and so on. We should be able to send the client a proposal before the end of next week.
Another big session was devoted to a review of the work Hubbub has been doing for the Learning Lab. We have three games under our belt so we talked about what worked and what didn’t. And we looked ahead and came up with a plan for the next phase. In general, we’ll be moving away from proper games and exploring more subtle ways of introducing rulesets into existing processes. It’s going to be more about making game-like learning tools and less about proper games that have second-order teaching effects.
On monday we announced This happened – Utrecht #8. Rainer Kohlberger, Helma van Rijn, Lotte Meijer and my friends at FourceLabs… it’s going to be awesome, I am sure. Three more weeks to go. Apart from the usual arrangements, not much needs to be done for this, luckily.
Those were the highlights of this week I guess. I did work on the Pampus project and on PLAY Pilots (have you seen the roundup in English for that one, by the way?) but that’s about it.
This happened – Utrecht #8, coming up
I have to say, number seven is still fresh in my mind. Even so, we’ve announced number eight. You’ll find the lineup below. I hope to see you in four weeks, on November 22 at the HKU Akademietheater.
Rainer Kohlberger is an independent visual artist based in Berlin. The concept and installation design for the THESEUS Innovation Center Internet of Things was done in collaboration with Thomas Schrott and is the basis for the visual identity of the technology platform. The installation connects and visually creates hierarchy between knowledge, products and services with a combination of physical polygon objects and virtually projected information layers. This atmospheric piece transfer knowledge and guidance to the visitor but also leaves room for interpretation.
Helma van Rijn is an Industrial Design Engineering PhD candidate at the TU Delft ID-StudioLab, specialized in 'difficult to reach' user groups. De Klessebessers is an activity for people with dementia to actively recall memories together. The design won the first prize in design competition Vergeethenniet and was on show during the Dutch Design Week 2007. De Klessebessers is currently in use at De Landrijt in Eindhoven.
FourceLabs talk about Wip 'n' Kip, a playful installation for Stekker Fest, an annual electronic music festival based in Utrecht. Players of Wip 'n' Kip use adult-sized spring riders to control a chicken on a large screen. They race each other to the finish while at the same time trying to stay ahead of a horde of pursuing monsters. Wip 'n' Kip is a strange but effective mashup of video game, carnival ride and performance. It is part of the PLAY Pilots project, commissioned by the city and province of Utrecht, which explore the applications of play in the cultural industry.
Lotte Meijer talks about Smarthistory, an online art history resource. It aims to be an addition to, or even replacement of, traditional text books through the use of different media to discuss hundreds of Western art pieces from antiquity to the current day. Different browsing styles are supported by a number of navigation systems. Art works are contextualized using maps and timelines. The site's community is engaged using a number of social media. Smarthistory won a Webby Award in 2009 in the education category. Lotte has gone on to work as an independent designer on many interesting and innovative projects in the art world.