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?