Tag: events

Design × AI coffee meetup

If you work in the field of design or arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence and are inter­est­ed in explor­ing the oppor­tu­ni­ties at their inter­sec­tion, con­sid­er your­self invit­ed to an infor­mal cof­fee meet­up on Feb­ru­ary 15, 10am at Brix in Amsterdam.

Erik van der Plui­jm and myself have for a while now been car­ry­ing on a con­ver­sa­tion about AI and design and we felt it was time to expand the cir­cle a bit. We are very curi­ous who else out there shares our excitement.

Ques­tions we are mulling over include: How does the design process change when cre­at­ing intel­li­gent prod­ucts? And: How can teams col­lab­o­rate with intel­li­gent design tools to solve prob­lems in new and inter­est­ing ways?

Any­way, lots to chew on.

No need to sign up or any­thing, just show up and we’ll see what happens.

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.

Theseus

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.

De Klessebessers

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.

Wip 'n' Kip

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.

Smarthistory

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.

Week 169

Fiona Raby once told me that the major­i­ty of her work with stu­dents at the RCA was about psy­chol­o­gy. After a week like this, I can see where she’s com­ing from. With­out going into too much detail, I had my work cut out for me with a new group of stu­dents who I will be work­ing with on a design research project at the HKU. After a first meet­ing with the team and a kick-off with the client the next day, it became clear I was deal­ing with a group with some seri­ous moti­va­tion­al issues. The trick was to fig­ure out where it all was com­ing from. To do this it was vital to try and see things as they real­ly are in stead of as they were pre­sent­ed to me by the group. After sev­er­al addi­tion­al ses­sions (mess­ing with my sched­ule but that comes with the ter­ri­to­ry) I had it fig­ured out more or less and have for­mu­lat­ed a plan to deal with it. Psychology.

In between all that crazi­ness my week con­sist­ed of:

  • Work­ing with my two new interns at Hub­bub. We reflect­ed on their expe­ri­ences at the Nat­ur­al Net­work­ing Fes­ti­val and pre­sent­ed a post-mortem of the first game to Thieu after attend­ing one of the Learn­ing Lab meetups.
  • Sketch­ing out addi­tions to the PLAY Pilots web­site nec­es­sary to sup­port the Zes­baans instal­la­tion for the Nether­lands Film Fes­ti­val. These will launch next week in time for the instal­la­tion’s unveil­ing on Thursday.
  • Pre­sent­ing my pre­lim­i­nary list of inter­ac­tive works suit­able for next year’s Twee­t­akt fes­ti­val. This is my first time curat­ing an event oth­er than This hap­pened. I am keen to mash up play­ful inter­ac­tion design with the fringes of game design and it seems Twee­t­akt are up for it too. Hap­py days.
  • Anoth­er full day of work on Maguro. Best part of which was a few qui­et hours to bang out a first playable paper pro­to­type of the game. Con­ver­gence is a bitch but always reward­ing when it happens.
  • Today, I hung out at BUROPONY and took care of a few odds and ends for their web­site. In return work has start­ed on a last bit of Hub­bub cor­po­rate iden­ti­ty: a design for the box to hold our busi­ness-slash-col­lectible play­ing cards.

And with that I am sign­ing off. A train is tak­ing me from Rot­ter­dam to Utrecht, per­haps I will be in time to catch the tail end of fri­day drinks at the Dutch Game Gar­den. Nev­er a dull moment there.

Playful street tiles, artful games and radioscapes at the next This happened – Utrecht

After a bit of a long sum­mer break Alexan­der, Ianus and I are back with anoth­er edi­tion of This hap­pened – Utrecht. Read about the pro­gram of the sev­enth edi­tion below. We’ll add a fourth speak­er to the ros­ter soon. The event is sched­uled for Mon­day 4 Octo­ber at The­ater Kikker in Utrecht. Doors open at 7:30PM. The reg­is­tra­tion opens next week on Mon­day 20 Sep­tem­ber at 12:00PM.

The Patchingzone

Anne Nigten is direc­tor of The Patch­ing­zone, a trans­dis­ci­pli­nary lab­o­ra­to­ry for inno­va­tion where Mas­ter, doc­tor, post-doc stu­dents and pro­fes­sion­als from dif­fer­ent back­grounds cre­ate mean­ing­ful con­tent. Ear­li­er, Anne Nigten was man­ag­er of V2_lab and com­plet­ed a PhD on a method for cre­ative research and devel­op­ment. Go-for-IT! is a city game cre­at­ed togeth­er with cit­i­zens of South Rot­ter­dam and launched in Decem­ber 2009. On four play­grounds in the area street tiles were equipped with LEDs. Locals could play games with their feet, sim­i­lar to con­sole game dance mats.

Ibb and Obb

Richard Boeser is an inde­pen­dent design­er based in Rot­ter­dam. His stu­dio Sparp­weed is cur­rent­ly work­ing on the game Ibb and Obb, sched­uled to launch for Playsta­tion Net­work and PC in August 2011. Ibb and Obb is a coop­er­a­tive game for two play­ers who togeth­er must find a way through a world where grav­i­ty is flipped across the hori­zon. Play­ers move between both sides of the world through por­tals. They can surf on grav­i­ty, soul­hop ene­mies and col­lect dia­monds. The game is part­ly financed by the Game Fund, an arrange­ment that seeks to stim­u­late the devel­op­ment of artis­tic games in the Netherlands.

Radioscape

Edwin van der Hei­de stud­ied sonol­o­gy at the Roy­al Con­ser­va­to­ry in The Hague. He now works as an artist in the field of sound, space and inter­ac­tion. Radioscape trans­forms urban space into an acoustic labyrinth. Based on the fun­da­men­tal prin­ci­ples of radio each par­tic­i­pant is equipped with a receiv­er, head­phones and an anten­na. Fif­teen trans­mit­ters each broad­cast their own com­po­si­tion. Inspired by short wave sounds, they over­lap to form a meta­com­po­si­tion. By chang­ing posi­tion, the inter­pre­ta­tion of sound is changed as well.

A big thank you to our spon­sors, Microsoft and Fier for mak­ing this one happen.

Announcing This happened – Utrecht #6

Last week we announced the sixth edi­tion of This hap­pened – Utrecht. The pro­gram was up on our Dutch site already, here’s the pro­gram in Eng­lish (soon avail­able on our inter­na­tion­al .org site, too). As always I am very excit­ed about the line-up. Can’t wait to hear what sto­ries these peo­ple have to share about their work. Doors open on Mon­day 10 May at 7:30PM. The reg­is­tra­tion starts on Mon­day 26 April at 12:00PM. See you there!

Keez Duyves is one of the cofounders of PIPS:lab, based in Ams­ter­dam, NL. Archie and the Bees, their newest the­atri­cal con­cept, links the pri­ma­ry col­ors red, green and blue to the pri­ma­ry ele­ments of rhythm: kick, snare and hi-hat. In this hybrid of mul­ti­me­dia per­for­mance and instal­la­tion, PIPS:lab demon­strate their rev­o­lu­tion­ary Radar­funk machine — allow­ing them to gen­er­ate sound from col­or. A light paint­ing or the col­ors in the audi­ence serve as musi­cal basis over which PIPS:lab impro­vise and amaze with their oth­er self-devel­oped instru­ments: the Bash­blender, the Grinder and the LCDC video guitar.

Matt Cot­tam is the founder of Tel­lart. Wood­en Log­ic rep­re­sents the first phase in a hands-on sketch­ing process aimed at explor­ing how nat­ur­al mate­ri­als and craft tra­di­tions can be brought to the cen­ter of inter­ac­tive dig­i­tal design to give mod­ern prod­ucts greater longevi­ty and mean­ing. It is only in the past decade or so that the com­mu­ni­ty and tools have evolved to the point that design­ers can sketch with hard­ware and soft­ware; which before that was the sole domain of engi­neers and com­put­er sci­en­tists. This project seeks to com­bine seem­ing­ly dis­so­nant ele­ments, nat­ur­al, mate­r­i­al and vir­tu­al, and explore how they can be craft­ed to feel as if they were born togeth­er as parts of a uni­fied object anato­my that is both sin­gu­lar and precious.

San­neke Prins and Berend Weij are co-founders of Mijn naam is Haas, a com­pa­ny that pro­duces a range of edu­ca­tion­al prod­ucts aimed at pri­ma­ry edu­ca­tion. These prod­ucts are all sit­u­at­ed in the world of the main char­ac­ter Haas. The range con­sists of illus­trat­ed chil­dren’s books, CD-ROMs and an online learn­ing envi­ron­ment, in which the vocab­u­lary of tod­dlers is increased through game prin­ci­ples. Chil­dren cre­ate the world of haas by draw­ing. All draw­ing actions direct­ly influ­ence the unfold­ing sto­ry, so each play ses­sion is unique which makes the game con­tin­u­ous­ly engag­ing. In this cre­ative process lan­guage ele­ments are pre­sent­ed in a play­ful man­ner. The first ver­sion of the game was cre­at­ed by the founders dur­ing their atten­dance of the EMMA pro­gram at the HKU.

Sebas­ti­aan de With is an inter­face and icon design­er work­ing under the name Cocoia. He designs, teach­es and runs a pop­u­lar blog on inter­faces and icons. Sebas­ti­aan is eas­i­ly rec­og­nized in Dracht­en wear­ing his Explod­ed Set­tings Icon or Bricky shirt and tot­ing an iPad. Clas­sics is one of the first pop­u­lar e‑readers on the iPhone, offer­ing pub­lic domain books in a well-designed expe­ri­ence. The project was ini­ti­at­ed by the Phill Ryu, (in)famous for MacHeist and his sup­port of the Deli­cious Gen­er­a­tion. Clear­ly the Clas­sics app is a feat of design dri­ven devel­op­ment, com­plete with an inspired wood­en book­shelf, curl­ing page turns (both now also avail­able on the iPad), mar­velous icons and a col­lec­tion of lov­ing­ly designed book covers.

We would­n’t be able to pull off this edi­tion with the sup­port of the Utrecht School of the Arts and Microsoft Design Tool­box. Thank you!

Janneke Sluijs completes THUTC #4 line-up

We’ve added one more speak­er to the line-up of This hap­pened – Utrecht #4:

Jan­neke Slui­js will talk about Noot, a small tool meant to sup­port cre­ative ses­sions. Noots can be phys­i­cal­ly attached to paper arte­facts that stim­u­late the cre­ative process. This way, audio frag­ments are tagged, mak­ing it pos­si­ble to retrieve the orig­i­nal audio con­text at a lat­er time, for rec­ol­lec­tion or inspi­ra­tion. Her sto­ry will focus on the ori­gins and devel­op­ment of the product.

Have a look at the oth­er three speak­ers in my pre­vi­ous post. Reg­is­tra­tion opens in a week on Octo­ber 12 at 12:00 hours at thishappened.nl. The event takes place in The­ater Kikker in Utrecht, on Octo­ber 26.

Announcing This happened – Utrecht #4

Four weeks from now we’re run­ning the fourth edi­tion of This hap­pened – Utrecht (the last one for this year). It’ll take place in The­ater Kikker again, on 26 Octo­ber and we’ll start at the usu­al time: 20:00 hours (doors op 19:30 hours). Ianus, Alexan­der and I have been debat­ing this edi­tion’s line-up fer­vent­ly, and have come up with the fol­low­ing three great speak­ers for you:

Elmo Diederiks will talk about the Ambi­light fea­ture in Philips flat pan­el tele­vi­sions. In 2002 Elmo worked as design­er and researcher at Philips Research and lead the research on how dynam­ic light­ing in the back­ground of the TV image enhances the view­ing expe­ri­ence. The research result­ed direct­ly in the most dif­fer­en­ti­at­ing fea­ture of Philips’ flat pan­el tele­vi­sions that remains a unique sell­ing point today.

Sue Doek­sen, mem­ber of the new media art col­lec­tive Zes­baans, will present De Metronoom. Six con­nect­ed instal­la­tions point six laser beams into the room. Vis­i­tors play the lasers like instru­ments and com­pose a sound­track, arrang­ing sam­ples from clas­si­cal instru­ments, street artists, beats and the machine room of a print­ing press. De Metronoom was present at the Mood Ele­va­tor par­ty at Trouw Ams­ter­dam and Stekkertest at Fes­ti­val aan de Werf in Utrecht. Sue gives us a look behind the scenes of De Metronoom’s devel­op­ment — which Zes­baans is hop­ing to con­tin­ue in the com­ing peri­od — and shares their ideas on tech­nol­o­gy, per­for­mance and interface.

Emi­ly Gob­eille and Theo Wat­son will present the process behind Funky For­est, an inter­ac­tive ecosys­tem where chil­dren cre­ate trees with their body and then divert the water flow­ing from the water­fall to the trees to keep them alive. The health of the trees con­tributes to the over­all health of the for­est and the types of crea­tures that inhab­it it. The Moom­ah Edi­tion of ‘Funky For­est’ expands on the orig­i­nal by intro­duc­ing four sea­sons, each with a unique envi­ron­ment and crea­tures to match. Each sea­son also fea­tures an inter­ac­tive par­ti­cle sys­tem. The Moom­ah edi­tion is per­ma­nent­ly installed at the Moom­ah Children’s Cafe in New York City. 

This edi­tion is made pos­si­ble by the sup­port from the Utrecht School of the Arts and Utrecht based web agency Rhi­nofly. Many thanks to them for their generosity. 

Reg­is­tra­tion opens Octo­ber 12 at thishappened.nl at 12:00 hours. Hope to see you there!

Work now so you can play later

There’s a lot going on at the Leapfrog stu­dio, which explains at least in part why things have gone qui­et around here. How­ev­er, I want­ed to take the time to alert you to some upcom­ing events that might be of interest.

An urban game in the Rotterdam city center

On Sun­day Sep­tem­ber 27 around 50 young peo­ple will play an urban game I designed for Your World — Rot­ter­dam Euro­pean Youth Cap­i­tal 2009.1 It is part of a two-day event called Change Your World, which enables groups of youth to set up a new ‘move­ment’ with finan­cial sup­port and advice from pro­fes­sion­als. You might want to hang around the Rot­ter­dam city cen­ter dur­ing the day, to wit­ness what is sure to be an inter­est­ing spec­ta­cle. More info should show up soon enough at the Your World web­site.

A pervasive game in the Hoograven neighborhood of Utrecht

Around the same time, from Sep­tem­ber 18 to Octo­ber 11, you’ll be able to play Kop­pelkiek in the Hoograven area of Utrecht. This is a game I’ve cre­at­ed for the Dutch Design Dou­ble pro­gram.2 To play, you take pho­tos of your­self with oth­ers in a range of sit­u­a­tions and upload them to the game’s web­site. It’s designed to sub­tly per­me­ate your dai­ly life. With the help of our play­ers we’re hop­ing to cre­ate a col­lec­tion of pho­tos that pro­vide a unique look into life in the neigh­bor­hood. Do join in if you’re in the area. Also, we’ll have a playtest on Sep­tem­ber 16. If you’re inter­est­ed in play­ing a round or two, drop me a line.3

Data visualizations of silence

I’m wrap­ping up some data visu­al­iza­tion work I’ve done for the artist Sarah van Sons­beeck.4 Sarah’s work revolves (amongst oth­er things) around the con­cept of silence. Alper and I took a dataset she gen­er­at­ed dur­ing a few of her ‘silence walks’ using a GPS track­er and a sound lev­el meter and cre­at­ed a num­ber of sta­t­ic visu­al­iza­tions in Pro­cess­ing. Some of the out­put can be seen at the exhi­bi­tion Een Dijk van een Kust. More will prob­a­bly be on dis­play at anoth­er occa­sion. Also, I’ve learnt some new tricks that I intend to share here soon.

What else, what else…

  • I’m still mean­ing to write some­thing up about the work that went into Mega Mon­ster Bat­tle Are­na™ but it will have to wait. I attend­ed two of the three shows and enjoyed both through­ly. There’s some pho­tos up at the opera’s web­site.
  • We’re in the process of fin­ish­ing up the This hap­pened – Utrecht #3 videos. Once they’re all done we’ll add them to the event’s page on the .org site along with the slides. Plan­ning for our fourth event has already start­ed. Mark your cal­en­dar for Octo­ber 26 and sub­scribe to our newslet­ter so you won’t miss the reg­is­tra­tion’s opening.
  • And final­ly, I’m slow­ly but sure­ly giv­ing shape to a new ven­ture which will focus on the use of play in pub­lic space to effect social change. Its name is Hub­bub. The crazy design­ers at BUROPONY are devel­op­ing a sweet brand iden­ti­ty and a first place­hold­er site is up. Stay tuned for more news on that.

That’s about it for now, thanks for your atten­tion. I promise to pro­vide con­tent with more meat and less self-pro­mo­tion in upcom­ing posts. 

  1. Karel Mil­lenaar, game design­er extra­or­di­naire at Fource­Labs and a fel­low res­i­dent of the Dutch Game Gar­den, has helped me out on this one. [↩]
  2. I’ve asked Tij­men Schep of Pinep­ple­Jazz, NetNiet.org and the new Utrecht medi­al­ab to be my part­ner on this one. [↩]
  3. Around the same time a lot of oth­er inter­est­ing stuff relat­ed to design and soci­ety will be going on, such as the third edi­tion of Utrecht Man­i­fest, the bien­ni­al for social design. [↩]
  4. I was turned on to this gig by the ubiq­ui­tous Alper Çuğun. [↩]

Buildings and Brains at the Nijmegen Design Platform (NOP)

It’s been a few weeks since I pre­sent­ed at the Nijmegen Design Plat­form (NOP), but I thought it would still be use­ful to post a sum­ma­ry of what I talked about here. 

Update: it took me a while, but the slides that accom­pa­nied this talk are now up at SlideShare. 

A lit­tle con­text: The NOP run fre­quent events for design­ers in the region. These design­ers most­ly work in more tra­di­tion­al domains such as graph­ic, fash­ion and indus­tri­al design. NOP asked Jeroen van Mas­trigt — a friend and occa­sion­al col­league of mine — to talk about games at one of their events. Jeroen in turn asked me to play Robin to his Bat­man, I would fol­low up his epic romp through game design the­o­ry with a brief look at per­va­sive games. This of course was an offer I could not refuse. The event was held at a love­ly loca­tion (the huge art-house cin­e­ma LUX) and was attend­ed by a healthy-sized crowd. Kudos to the NOP for orga­niz­ing it and many thanks to them (and Jeroen) for invit­ing me.

So, what I tried to do in the talk was to first give a sense of what per­va­sive games are, what char­ac­ter­izes them. I drew from the Hide & Seek web­site for the list of char­ac­ter­is­tics and used The Soho Project as a run­ning exam­ple through­out this part. I also tied the char­ac­ter­is­tics to some the­o­ry I found interesting:

  • Mix­ing dig­i­tal tech­nol­o­gy with real world play — I empha­sized that ulti­mate­ly, tech­nol­o­gy is but a means to an end. At Inter­ac­tion ‘09 Robert Fab­ri­cant said the medi­um of inter­ac­tion design is human behav­ior. I think the same holds true for the design of per­va­sive games.
  • Social inter­ac­tion — Raph Koster once said sin­gle play­er games are a his­tor­i­cal aber­ra­tion. It is clear much of the fun in per­va­sive games is social. In a way I think they bridge the gap between the “old” board games and con­tem­po­rary video games.
  • Using the city as a play­ground — Here I could not resist bring­ing in Jane Jacob’s notions of the city as an enti­ty that is organ­ised from the bot­tom up and Kevin Lynch’s work on the men­tal maps we cre­ate of cities as we move through them. Cities play a vital role in facil­i­tat­ing the play of per­va­sive games. At best they are the main pro­tag­o­nist of them.
  • Trans­form­ing pub­lic spaces into the­atri­cal stage­sets — This is relat­ed to the pre­vi­ous one, but here I made a side­step into the embod­ied nature of play­er inter­ac­tions in per­va­sive games and how embod­i­ment facil­i­tates read­ing at a dis­tance of such actions. In a sense, the social fun of embod­ied play is due to its per­for­ma­tive quality.

After this, I tried to show why design­ers out­side the domain of games should care about per­va­sive games. This I did by talk­ing about ways they can be used for pur­pos­es oth­er than ‘mere’ enter­tain­ment. These were:

  • Enlarg­ing per­ceived real­i­ty; you can cre­ate games that play with the way we cus­tom­ar­i­ly per­ceive real­i­ty. This was inspired by the talk Kevin Slavin of Area/Code deliv­ered at MIND08. Exam­ples I used were Cross­roads and The Com­fort of Strangers.
  • Chang­ing human behav­ior for the bet­ter; think of the Toy­ota Prius dash­board­’s effect on people’s dri­ving behav­ior. Exam­ples of games that use feed­back loops to steer us towards desir­able goals are Cryp­to­Zoo and FourSquare.
  • Crowd­sourc­ing solu­tions; games can sim­u­late pos­si­ble futures and chal­lenge play­ers to respond to their prob­lems. Here I used Jane McGo­ni­gal’s ideas around col­lec­tive intel­li­gence gam­ing. The exam­ple game I talked about was World With­out Oil.
  • Con­vey­ing argu­ments pro­ce­du­ral­ly; Ian Bogost’s con­cept of pro­ce­dur­al rhetoric isn’t spe­cif­ic to per­va­sive games, but I think the way they get mixed up with every­day life make them par­tic­u­lar­ly effec­tive chan­nels for com­mu­ni­cat­ing ideas. I used The Go Game, Cru­el 2B Kind and Join the Line1 as examples. 

By talk­ing about these things I hoped to pro­vide a link to the audience’s own design prac­tice. They may not deal with games, but they sure­ly deal with com­mu­ni­cat­ing ideas and chang­ing people’s behav­ior. Come to think of it though, I was doing a very old media style pre­sen­ta­tion in attempt to achieve the same… Oh well.

  1. Join the Line is a game stu­dents con­cep­tu­al­ized dur­ing a work­shop I ran. [↩]

A third This happened – Utrecht coming this way

Around this time, an email to the ever-grow­ing This hap­pened – Utrecht mail­ing list will be sent to announce our third edi­tion, which will take place on Mon­day 29 June at The­ater Kikker in Utrecht.

This happened – Utrecht #3 collage

Clock­wise: Trompe L’Oeil, FluxFloor, Swarm and Hyper Human.

As always, I am super excit­ed about hear­ing the sto­ries our won­der­ful speak­ers will tell about the things they’ve made. Here’s who’ll be there this time around:

  • Aldo Hoeben of field­OfView will dis­cuss his work on Trompe L’Oeil; a panoram­ic pro­jec­tion in the alcove of one of Utrecht’s old­est churches.
  • David Kouse­mak­er and Tim Old­en of Blendid will give us an inside look at the work behind their lat­est inter­ac­tive light instal­la­tion called Swarm.
  • Lucy McRae will go into the details of her Hyper Human project, which con­sists of explo­rations of fash­ion that is grown on the human body.
  • Anouk Randag of 31Volts, final­ly, will talk about FluxFloor, the sus­tain­able dance floor she designed while grad­u­at­ing at TU Delft.

We’re going to open up reg­is­tra­tion in two weeks time on Mon­day 15 June at 12:00. I expect space to fill up real quick again as usu­al. So mark your cal­en­dars and set an alarm!