Tag: food

Singapore

I am back in the Netherlands for over seven weeks now but I am still busy running around the country reconnecting to people and telling them about my experiences in Singapore.

It was great.

I really did manage to reconsider a lot of things and got reoriented, about which more later.

Learned a lot about myself and others by meeting and working with lots of new people from different backgrounds.

And I do miss the city already. The iron-clad guarantee of sun and warmth. Many places to explore offering lots of surprising experiences. And on every street corner, amazing affordable food.

I will miss Singapore, and I am thankful for all it has done for me in the brief period I got to call it my home.

Below are some photos. More are over at Flickr. Happy scrolling and maybe don’t look at these if you’re hungry.

Continue reading Singapore

Week 176

As I was starting to write this a discussion broke out on dramaturgy and game design. So I got sidetracked debating similarities and differences between disciplines and most importantly what they have to offer to each other. The room was filled with interaction designers, game designers and folk with a theatre background.1 So that was interesting.

More mixing of disciplines: on tuesday I spent a day working on Buta with Irene van Peer, a product designer with a tremendous amount of experience in the healthcare domain. We sat down and managed to push the work forward through lots of sketching and making. Next up is more work with pigs and farmers on site.

The rest of this week was taken up by work for PLAY Pilots (Monobanda’s Bandjesland for Le Guess Who? is turning out great), the Pampus project at the HKU, and a few meetings for new projects on the horizon.

I have been paying attention to my calory intake the past few weeks. It turned out this was far too low. Now that I am eating much more I find myself being able to cope with less sleep, more stress and just generally feeling much better. Which also makes for more pleasure taken from my work. Who’d have thought food could be such an upper?

  1. Wieger and Sylvan, interns at Hubbub, study Design for Virtual Theatre and Games at the HKU. [↩]

Restaurant usability

'U kunt hier ook zitten'

I ran into this curious sign while out for lunch today. A small restaurant specialising in pie (vlaai) had these huge letters in the window, saying: “you can sit here as well”. Obviously, if they made it obvious to potential clients that they had seating, they wouldn’t need the sign – or is it a case of people not wanting to sit down and have a piece of pie?

To me, the sign was quite similar to those texts in web pages reading “click here to …” – always a clear sign of bad usability. Perhaps the pie shop is in need of some user experience consulting?