Category: Links

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.

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.

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.

Interesting visualization of the growth of Utrecht, my hometown. The jump between the 60s and 80s is startling.

“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.

As if my list of books to read isn’t long enough already.

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.

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.

“…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.

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.

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.

A news ticker for your feeds. Far too obtrusive for my liking, but then I have all notifications on my system turned off.

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.

“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.”

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.”

The Lift10 brand design looks sweet. The theme is a welcome one too. I can do with some humanism in these techno-fetishistic times.

(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.

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.

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.

Adam Greenfield and Nurri Kim have launched Do projects. “We have an ambition to design and make meaningful things — primarily books, but eventually other things as well — and we’ve chosen this as our way of learning-by-doing.” The first book to come out of Do is Kim’s Tokyo Blues, a curious photographic survey of blue tarps in the Tokyo cityscape (of which you can get a free PDF through the site).

Congratulations to the BERG team for landing this funding.

“RUIMTEVOLK is a new platform on environment and spatial quality in the Netherlands.” Interesting, particularly because of its interdisciplinary approach. No interaction design in there though, apparently.

An interesting “game” (more like a playful process) that attempts to crowdsource solutions to some of the big challenges contemporary cities face. Via the VURBians.

Chris reports on Decode; an exhibition that seems to good to let pass. So much good work on show. I’ll need to hop to London for it, I’m afraid.

“The keeping real of shit matters to some people, but it does not matter to me. It’s fashion, and I don’t like fashion, because fashion does not matter. What matters is that you do good work. What matters is that you produce things that are true and will stand.” I’ll go with a shorter quote than Tom (Armitage, via whom I found this) but I agree, the whole thing is worth a read. Especially for someone with critical tendencies, like myself.

The thing I like the most about Dennis’ talk is his point about “augmented reality” being more than annotations on top of a view of the world through your mobile screen. The origins of Foursquare were also enlightening. Some of the design choices make more sense knowing it got started as a highly personalized travel guide.

A solid intro to some of the current thinking around urban computing and the next phase of development for cities. I particularly enjoyed Atau Tanaka’s brief but close reading of situatonist ideas and how that relates to current practices, as well as his reminder that a lot of interesting stuff around the concept of psychogeography has been done in a pre-digital age.

“Roy can’t communicate his obsession through conventional language and is forced into non-verbal communication. He has to make what he is thinking in order to express it.” A post looking at the film Close Encounters of the Third Kind and what it has to say about the value of making. Via Matt Jones.

A good example of artists creating a context for citizens to participate in the planning of urban space. In 2008, the Parfyme collective ran a ‘laboratory’ in Copenhagen harbor where people could come in and experiment with new uses for the area.

James Bridle showed this as an example of awesomeness during his Playful ’09 talk. Being a big fan of Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, this blew me away. 760 illustrations, one for each page in the book. Awesome indeed.

“Fabel designs and produces participatory contexts for learning that are intended for change of attitude and behaviours. […] Fabel call these methods “wind tunnels”, environments to challenge the perception of the target group.” I was impressed with the talk Molly Ränge gave at Playful ’09. She showed many examples of projects done in Scandinavia that employ physical games to create a context for learning. A space I am very much interested in exploring further with Hubbub.

Having worked on a silence level data visualization, this iPhone app that collects audio measurements from around the world and aggregates them is of some interest to me. It could be interesting to plug their data into our Processing sketch…

1993 iPhones, 119717 throws, 48317.04 seconds of “hangtime”, and counting! Possibly the best game I have seen for the iPhone yet; one that requires players to be very brave (or have spare iPhones lying around). Picked this up at Playful ’09.

“You should see what I see.” Indeed! I cannot begin to imagine what goes on inside Gondry’s head as he plans the whole video for the Chemical Brothers’ track ‘Star Guitar’ out on paper. The prototype clip made with shoes, oranges and cans is a wonderful example of fast and cheap iteration that I plan on using with students the next time we talk about the role of sketching in design. (Another Design by Fire 2009 left over, from Matt Jones’ talk.)

Another snippet left over from DxF 2009. It is one thing to dream about a tree that can be suspended from a tree, but to make one is something completely else.

This was still lying around in my notes from Design by Fire 2009. James and Cennyd showed this clip as part of their presentation on the parallels between interaction design and music. It just blew me away. Apparently there’s something universally human about this pentatonic scale.

I can relate to the tweet from Tom Coates that Russel blogs about here. It’s (part of) the reason I’ve been having trouble getting back into blogging. I should just start throwing out fragments there again, I guess.