Category: Links

One of the winning games at this year’s Global Game Jam in NL. Pulse is a collaborative rhythm action game.

Chris experiments with using flight progress strips for to-do management. Ever since reading about them in Where the Action Is I’ve been fascinated with these things. Nice to finally see what they look like.

Iskander has posted a report of the second Dutch This happened within hours of its culmination. Crazy. Interestingly, he’s spotted a theme while we did not plan on having any. In Dutch.

“Topobo is the world’s first construction toy with kinetic memory, the ability to record and playback physical motion.” An awesome toy. Via Jerome.

“I hear there’s real wooden furniture, and paper books. You can have a lie down and read. / What’s a lie down? / Not sure, but I heard that’s what people did back then. / Crazy. / I can’t wait.” Alex switches from speculative modelling to speculative storytelling. Wonderful.

“The result is a highly dynamic overlay of current conditions, soundings and action potentials made explicit and superimposed on the city – something we might think of as network weather.” An outline of sorts for Greenfield’s new book. Network weather, what a lovely metaphor.

Lots to chew on in this post on location based services by Matt Jones. I think predictive modelling of the future using past location data is an interesting avenue of exploration. The hardest problem, as far as I’m concerned, is how to communicate the ambiguity and potential multiplicity of said future in visualizations?

A brief discussion of This happened in Dutch. Mainly focussed on the DIY / grass roots nature of the events and the fact that it is supported by cheap and / or free online tools.

My friends at Tinker.it! are making prototyping for physical computing even simpler with TinkerKit: “TinkerKit is an Arduino-compatible physical computing prototyping toolkit aimed at design professionals.”

MIMOA announces their appearance at This happened – Utrecht #2. Looking forward to their talk.

A short talk by Kevin Slavin at MIND08, about breaking machines “not to escape reality, but to make reality bigger … to evoke in stead of inform … not to ground us further, but to keep us further on our toes”.

Architects responsible for the Blur Building and the upcoming Alice Tully Hall.

Of interest because of Gilberto Esparza’s Urban Parasites, the example of parents prototyping the addition of a small playground to the corner of their block, and the observation that with the arrival of the real-time city “governance becomes more akin to gardening”.

Write-up of a workshop-like IxDA event, focused on a brief design project mainly involving sketching and a critique session afterwards. A nice idea. Via Peter.

Brief description of the project done by the people of Mobile Monday Amsterdam at the fablab in Utrecht. Looking forward to seeing this in action.

“A Parascope resembles traditional scenic viewer binoculars but instead of showing the here and now, it displays several visualisations of how things might be in the future in that particular place.” An Unsworn Industries project for the city of Malmö. I can’t wait to see the next phase, where they will allegedly open up the viewer content for outside contributions.

“What is the relationship between wine varieties and flavor components? This visualization attempts to show the strength of these relationships. I culled descriptive flavor words from over 5,000 published wine tasting notes written between 1995-2000 in a major Australian wine magazine.” Simple but fun, mainly due to its subject matter.