Author: Kars Alfrink

Designer turned design researcher. Postdoc at TU Delft. Exploring contestable AI.

Week 151

So, some notes for the past week. They will be very short because there is not much to tell really. It was one of those weeks with a lull in between projects, and also virtually devoid of meetings, today being the exception.

I went over to LikeMind to catch up with my fellow Dutchman Mark, who seems to be doing great, living and working between Copenhagen and London. Not the shabbiest pair of cities.

I also had another chat with the guys running the U-Turm project who seem to be making nice progress with the image tracking side of things and are now really getting into the game design. Which means, as I told them, they need to start iterating on the rules like crazy, doing paper prototype after paper prototype.

Aside from this I’ve been doing some preparations for PLAY, reaching out to creative teams and individuals who I’d like to see be part of the productions we’re going to be running. Getting lots of positive responses so that is great. I also posted some background on the work we’ve been doing so far for this at the Hubbub blog.

Julius and Karel ran a successful second urban games workshop in Leidsche Rijn for Cultuur19 last saturday. We are now gearing up to assist with NU Grounds, a games festival in the same neighborhood where there will be several urban games on offer. That’s going to take place two weeks form now and should be good fun.

The relative quiet this week has allowed me some time to tinker with Processing, particularly the Box2D library that Mr. Shiffman has put together. I’m just making a little silly software toy with that to kind of flex my flimsy programming skills. Nothing special but I might post some screenshots and maybe a screencast later anyway.

And also, I bit the bullet, installed XCode, and had a go at OpenFrameworks, mostly to have a look at some of the Box2D stuff out there that is controlled with OpenCV (a computer vision library). That seems to be a really nice basis for gaming in public space using urban projections and such. I don’t see myself working in OpenFrameworks though, it really is an increase in complexity as opposed to Processing. Still, by messing with it, I can now appreciate it better.

Next week is going to be my last one here in Copenhagen and looks like it’ll be slightly more busy, with another trip to Malmö and a lecture at CIID. After that it’s back to NL. Time really flies.

links for 2010-05-19

  • EyeWriter Initiative
    “The EyeWriter project is an ongoing collaborative research effort to empower people who are suffering from ALS with creative technologies. It is a low-cost eye-tracking apparatus & custom software that allows graffiti writers and artists with paralysis resulting from Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis to draw using only their eyes.” Well-deserved winner of the Prix Ars Electronica.
    (tags: graffiti ALS tools creativity interactiondesign IxD)
  • Tom Gerhardt | Mud Tub
    “By sloshing, squishing, pulling, punching, etc, in a tub of mud (yes, wet dirt), users control games, simulators, and expressive tools; interacting with a computer in a new, completely organic, way.” Mud, I wonder how that idea came into being.
    (tags: mud computers interactiondesign play physical tangible interaction touch)

links for 2010-05-17

  • Anoto
    Had a chat with some of the guys behind this company at ThoughtMade. They showed a bit of patterned foil that you could print and stick on a regular screen, making it work with their digital pens. A cheap way (compared to Wacom’s Cintiq, for instance) to make big screens with pen based interactions.
    (tags: pens screens digital paper writing interactions hardware)
  • Muse · FIELD Generative Strategies in Graphic Design
    Ran into the people behind FIELD last friday, who were in Copenhagen to present this video that was commissioned by Netfilmmakers Gallery: “In their video Muse, FIELD is remixing their private digital scrapbooks from the last 3 years. A flood of inspiring images and references is transformed into an ocean of colour, fuelled from Evernote, our blog field.io/process, our favourites on Google Reader and Flickr, and other sources.”
    (tags: field muse videos data visualizations animations generative remix)
  • BLDGBLOG: Pieces of the city are forming, like islands
    “”The use of certain products, such as kites, mountain bikes and GPS monitors, has a bearing on the way in which landscape is understood.” The landscape is instrumentalized, we might say, distilled through dense layers of technological abstraction to become, once again, a place inhabitable by human activity, however pathetic or impressively persistent it might be.” Which more or less sums up what I find so fascinating about working in new urban development areas such as Leidsche Rijn. To see if there are ways to transform in between spaces into social places for play.
    (tags: landscapes architecture cities technology adaptation humanism photography)
  • Michael Cisco’s “Jungle Mind” 5/04
    “The New Weird has come into being, such as it is and whatever it should be, on its own and not by dint of any decision or program, so the attribution of decisions and schemes to it ought to be seen as prescriptions rather than as descriptions.” This passage, from a slightly confusing essay on the contemporary literary fantasy scene, got me thinking about discussions about interaction design and this exact kind of confusion that often happens. People expressing a hope or a wish about it, but presenting it as an objective fact. Whereas, for instance, what we are trying to do with This happened is to just show the work and in doing so, just describe what is going on.
    (tags: scenes movements literature newweird fantasy)

links for 2010-05-14

Week 150

That’s a nice number, 150. One-hundred-and-fifty. I like the sound of that. So what’s been going on this week?

I hopped on a plane last Sunday to the Netherlands for This happened – Utrecht #6. Wouldn’t miss out on my own party, of course. And I’m so glad I didn’t, because we had awesome talks by Berend & Sanneke, Matt, Sebastiaan and Keez, plus a surprise appearance over Skype by Mr. Buxton. The room was packed, interaction designers of all stripes were chatting away beforehand, during the break and afterwards over drinks. I had a blast and judging by the reports that have been coming in, so have many others.

Before heading back to the Netherlands the next day I managed to squeeze in a few meetings. One of those was for PLAY which, now that I’ve wrapped up project Tako,1 is ready to move into its next phase. We’re planning to produce several playful ‘things’ for a number of cultural events and tie them all together with a meta-game. It’s a matter of getting all the right people on board now and getting going as fast as possible. So I’ve a list of folks to contact in the coming days.

I think I broke a personal record for the number of Skype sessions in one day on Wednesday, with back to back talks with my HKU students as well as a planning session with Karel and Julius for an urban games workshop they’ll be running tomorrow in Leidsche Rijn.2

And today, after spending Ascension day on a couch, plugging away at email and to-dos, I’ll be making the trip across the Øresund to Malmö in a bus full of makers and interaction designers to attend ThoughtMade, which I’m really excited about; an exhibition and talks including a candy machine controlled by Twitter. What more can one ask for?

  1. I need to write a report on that one at the Hubbub blog soon. [↩]
  2. A new development area of Utrecht I’d say is the closest thing to a real-world Sim City project that I ever saw. [↩]

links for 2010-05-13

links for 2010-05-07

  • Homesense | Every home has a story to tell
    “Homesense will bring the open collaboration methods of online communities to physical infrastructures in the home. Over the course of several months, selected households across Europe (UK, France and Italy initially) will have access to the latest in open source hardware and software tools, decide what they want to do with them in the context of their home and share the results with the world.” Really proud of Tinker for getting this off the ground. Can’t wait to see what comes of it.
    (tags: homes living internetofthings physical computing hardware tinkerlondon)
  • eric zimmerman · film
    “PLAY is a short film […] created with filmmaker David Kaplan. The 18-minute film takes place in a future where the lines between games and reality have become blurred[. It] unfolds as a series of videogames, nested inside each other like a set of Russian Dolls.” Can’t wait for this to appear online.
    (tags: films play ericzimmerman future fiction speculative)
  • Games « Local No. 12
    “BackChatter is a game about predicting Twitter trends. […] Each round, you pick three words that you think will be popular in tweets about the conference during the next game round. You send in your votes with a direct message to the game consisting of the three words you want to pick.” A clever social game running on top of Twitter. I like how it plays with the sometimes annoying behavior on Twitter during conferences, of people just namedropping stuff or tweeting things verbatim.
    (tags: twitter games social predictions conferences LocalNo12)