Week 146

Crazy, crazy week I am glad to have survived. But wait, it’s not done yet. Tomorrow (saturday) I’ll be running a workshop in Leidsche Rijn with local young folk, for Cultuur19. The aim is to design a little social game that’ll function as a viral marketing tactic for our upcoming urban games design workshop in the same district. This is a Hubbub mission, and I am glad to have the support of Karel who – besides cooking up crazy plans at FourceLabs – is an occasional agent of Hubbub.

This was my last week working on site with Layar because I’m heading to Copenhagen on sunday. I’ll be staying there for a few weeks, working there – for Layar still, possibly for Social Square – lecturing at CIID and apart from that just taking it a little slower. My apartment is around the corner from the Laundromat Café in Nørrebro so that should be no problem.

I was at Waag Society‘s beautiful Theatrum Anatomicum last wednesday to cohost a workshop on games and architecture as part of the Best Scene in Town project initiated by 7scenes. I presented three bold predictions for the future of games in the city. Look for a write-up of that one at the Hubbub blog soon. The teams came up with interesting concepts for games in Amsterdam and I enjoyed working with all of them.

Going back to the start of this week, I turned 30 on monday. A watershed moment of some sort I guess. Somewhat appropriately, we announced This happened – Utrecht #6 that day too. Check out the program, I am real pleased with our speakers.

Now let’s just hope that volcano doesn’t mess with my flight in sunday and the next note will be coming to you from lovely CPH.

Week 144

In between the work I’ve been doing at Layar (which I can’t really tell you much about still, sadly) it’s been a relatively quiet week.

On monday I got my photo taken for this book on creative SMEs in Utrecht that I mentioned in the previous weeknotes. I had a chat with Lodewijk of Stekker Fest about the next phase of Tako and then headed off to Amsterdam for Mobile Monday #15. As is often the case with MoMo, I ended up half provoked – I find the views of Singularity people a little problematic – and half inspired – Booreiland and Tinker.it! had some fine design work to share. The best part was the pleasant dinner I had afterwards with Alexandra, Iskander and Peter.

On tuesday, after a day of hard graft at Layar I had a chat with Jeroen about Tako too. We’ve more or less figured out the organizational scheme we’ll need to push things forward so now it’s a matter of finding a few more people to help run it. We have a list.

Wednesday morning was spent at the HKU; chatting with several of my students about their progress. Compared to the ones I had last year, these guys are more hands-on and have all started building stuff already. That makes mentoring much easier. In the afternoon I spent some time at Waag Society talking to Ronald and Martijn about a 7scenes workshop we’ll be running on april 14. If you’re reading this, it might be of interest to you. Have a look.

Yesterday (thursday) and today are all about Layar again so not much to report there. Next week’s notes will discuss just four working days since it’s Easter here. I’m looking forward to a longish weekend catching up with friends and family. See you on the other side.