Tag: Hubbub

My plans for 2016

Long story short: my plan is to make plans.

Hubbub has gone into hibernation. After more than six years of leading a boutique playful design agency I am returning to freelance life. At least for the short term.

I will use the flexibility afforded by this freeing up of time to take stock of where I have come from and where I am headed. ‘Orientation is the Schwerpunkt,’ as Boyd says. I have definitely cycled back through my meta-OODA-loop and am firmly back in the second O.

To make things more interesting I have exchanged the Netherlands for Singapore. I will be here until August. It is going to be fun to explore the things this city has to offer. I am curious what the technology and design scene is like when seen up close. So I hope to do some work locally.

I will take on short commitments. Let’s say no longer than two to three months. Anything goes really, but I am particularly interested in work related to creativity and learning. I am also keen on getting back into teaching.

So if you are in Singapore, work in technology or design and want to have a cup of coffee. Drop me a line.

Happy 2016!

Week 183

And so the last workweek of the year has come to an end. I’ve just wrapped some going-away gifts for Wieger and Sylvan, who have been interns at Hubbub for the past four months. I’ve put together a little survival kit containing everything a junior agent of Hubbub needs to make it out in the big bad world.

It’s been a relatively quiet week, with some work on Maguro, which will kick off properly in the new year when all of the team is back on deck. Alper has started doing some small software prototyping of the basic gameplay. Prototypes over ideas, that’s how I prefer to do things.

I went over to the Netherlands Film Festival to look back on our collaboration as part of the PLAY Pilots project. Seems like we’re both keen to do more work together in 2011, which is nice.

I was at Mediamatic wednesday night to do an Ignite talk on the work that’s been going on at Hubbub. That went quite well (I was glad to have practiced the thing a few times, because the time pressure is killer). I’ll post slides and a transcript to the Hubbub blog soonish.

I managed to squeeze in some shenanigans in the snow too. A nice follow up to last friday’s snow fight, this time I rode a too-fast-for-my-own-good sleigh down the side of the old city fortifications towards the moat and almost collided with a dog and a little kid. I managed to stay dry though. That was fun.

And with that it is time to sign off. I started writing these weeknotes at the beginning of this year and wasn’t at all sure if I would keep it up. Turns out I did, and I have to say it’s been a pleasure to write these for the most part.

Even so, I don’t think I’ll keep writing these here in 2011. Most of my work now happens at Hubbub so I’ll be writing the occasional update over at the blog there.

When it comes to the link posts, I used to do this with Delicious, but like many I’ve made the switch to Pinboard last week. I don’t think I’ll reactivate link posts, so if you want to follow the bookmarks, follow me there.

And of course there’s my personal Twitter account, and the Hubbub one. That might be easiest in fact although maybe a bit overwhelming at times.

All that’s left to say is thank you for reading this, have a merry Christmas a happy new year, and I will catch you again sometime somewhere.

Week 182

First at the studio, coffee brewing, Tron Legacy soundtrack playing making this feel like an epic morning. It’s week 182 which means the penultimate workweek of this year. I’m looking forward to a much needed holiday between Christmas and the new year during which I will be completely off the grid. Being disconnected has become a luxury.

Thing are quieting down, but still there’s plenty to do, although things seem a little less fragmented. I basically focused on getting a new project codenamed Maguro off the ground. I signed the contract with the client and briefed the team. We’ll be making a pervasive game aimed at creating a change in the attitude of a large governmental service’s personnel. It’s ambitious and exciting. Good thing I have some very bright minds on the team: Alper, Simon, Karel and Niels. We’ll get started properly next year. Can’t wait.

Besides this I went over to Muiden to attend a demo and presentation of the game my students created for the island of Pampus. There was too much ice in the IJsselmeer so we couldn’t actually go to the island, so the demo was done on a dike with a view of the lake. I took some photos. It was great.

And in between I have been talking to the studios who created the PLAY Pilots live games. Evaluating the project, so that if we get to do it again in the new year (which I am very much hoping we can) we keep doing what we did well, and improve on the things we could have done better.

With that it’s time to sign off and dive into friday. Tonight’s Hubbub Christmas drinks at Kafe België. Very much looking forward to that.

Week 175

This week, a large chunk of my time was taken up by the return of project Maguro. A few weeks ago, I think it was number 171, we (a team of freelance consultants put together by Demovides) presented our concept. It turns out the client liked this concept so much, they actually want it produced, pronto. Demovides has asked Hubbub to take care of all creative work, which is great. I’ve been planning the project, together with the other folks driving it, and figuring out budgets and deadlines and deliverables and so on. We should be able to send the client a proposal before the end of next week.

Another big session was devoted to a review of the work Hubbub has been doing for the Learning Lab. We have three games under our belt so we talked about what worked and what didn’t. And we looked ahead and came up with a plan for the next phase. In general, we’ll be moving away from proper games and exploring more subtle ways of introducing rulesets into existing processes. It’s going to be more about making game-like learning tools and less about proper games that have second-order teaching effects.

On monday we announced This happened – Utrecht #8. Rainer Kohlberger, Helma van Rijn, Lotte Meijer and my friends at FourceLabs… it’s going to be awesome, I am sure. Three more weeks to go. Apart from the usual arrangements, not much needs to be done for this, luckily.

Those were the highlights of this week I guess. I did work on the Pampus project and on PLAY Pilots (have you seen the roundup in English for that one, by the way?) but that’s about it.

Week 174

STT again

This week on Wednesday I found myself in the lovely KNAW building to talk about the far future of applied game design. I was invited to do so by STT, together with David Shaffer, Jeroen van Mastrigt and Jeroen Elfferich. I talked about the incapacity of design as well as science fiction to effectively imagine a future, how to deal with that as a designer, and two areas that I see as truly virgin territory for applied game design: the new type of city we’ve seen emerge in the East, and synthetic biology. I got some nice responses and some challenging questions from the crowd, so I guess things went OK. The annotated slides will find their way to the Hubbub blog soon.

Aside from this, I spent the week working on PLAY Pilots – continuing work on the next pilot for Le Guess Who? together with Monobanda. And at the HKU, working with my students on the Pampus project. Finally, my interns have kicked off their third game at the Learning Lab, this one running on their internal blog platform. It involves monkeys and a blind dragon. Looking forward to the writeup for that one.

Quite a few bits of content found their way online too, by the way. In case you missed them the first time around, here they are:

Plus a video of the Bocce Drift session Hubbub ran a while back:

Week 171 & 172

I have a lot on my plate at the moment. A bit too much it seems. So it’s a good thing I got to wrap up a few things in the past two weeks…

Most notably Maguro, for which we presented our design to the client last wednesday. We gave away quite a show, including music and spoken word performances. The whole thing was well-received.

Another delivery of a kind was This happened – Utrecht #7. Never before did it take us so long to complete our speaker lineup. It’s an experience I would like to prevent in future, but we couldn’t really help it. As a result, I had very few expectations about this particular one, but it turned out great. We even managed to try out a few new things. A new clock, and a new “badge” (actually a button). Good stuff. Some nice reports have been written about it, too.

More deliveries, at the Netherlands Film Festival we had a good run with PLAY Pilots live game number two: De Stereoscoop by Zesbaans. We managed to get some nice publicity, we had it set up at the closing party and lots of people played on it. Good stuff.

Apart from this I have been busy finding projects for Tweetakt 2011’s interactive program, and managing the Pampus group project at the HKU.1 My interns at Hubbub are also plugging away at the Learning Lab games, they delivered their second one last week.

Good grief. No wonder I was a little sick and had to take a day off yesterday. I’m hoping to take a it a little bit easier the coming period. No idea how, though. Any ideas?

  1. The group is blogging, too, by the way. [↩]

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.

Week 168

So, I got back from a one-week holiday on Terschelling last weekend (which was lovely, by the way) and immediately dove into work again. So much to do at the moment, it’s a challenge not to get swamped. Anyway. And it is one of those weeks where I need to look back on my calendar just to remember what has been going on…

Most notably, two interns have started at Hubbub. They are working on games for the second installment of the Learning Lab, an experimental educational program created by River Institute, which will be running at the University of Amsterdam the coming months. Their first assignment is to design a game that will be played by Learning Lab participants (who are called “pioneers”) today and tomorrow at the Natural Networking Festival. It is nice to have these guys on board. This week I regularly sat down with them to review their plans but aside from this they are incredibly self-steering. They’ll be blogging about their exploits on the Hubbub blog soon.

Also, I had a full day of work on Maguro yesterday. We spent the whole day at the client’s office (a large governmental organization which I can’t name at the moment). The morning was taken up by short presentations from the side of us, the design team. We also had the chance to talk to a selection of people from our target audience and get a tour of their work environment. In the afternoon we sat down to brainstorm concepts, and came up with some interesting ones. I enjoyed getting a chance to see this organization from the inside, which due to to the sensitive nature of their work is a little secretive. We decided to use part of the workshop’s program to try out some mechanics that we might be using in the game, without the audience being aware of it. That lead to some interesting results.

This week is bookended by meetings for project Ika. This project is run from the still very new Design for Playful Impact research group at the HKU. On monday I spent some time with the people leading the other projects to get a general sense of the program. Today I’ll be meeting up with the client for the first time.

And in between I’ve been doing more work on PLAY Pilots. I dropped by Zesbaans to check out an early version of their installation for the Netherlands Film Festival, which is called The Stereoscope and is this kind of toy-like VJ-ing tool loaded with fragments from Dutch films from the past 30 years. Awesome, awesome, stuff. It’s already fun to play with, even though the custom-built console is yet to be finished and the game mechanics haven’t been implemented yet.

And finally, in other news: we announced the next This happened – Utrecht, and I uploaded a selection of photos from the Bocce Drift game Hubbub ran a few weeks ago.

Week 165

So week 165. One of those old-fashioned fragmented weeks that reminds me of why I decided a while ago that I should stop having more than two meetings on one day. Anyway.

Following the weekend of Stekker Fest craziness I had a bit of an off day on Monday. Tuesday I sat down with Ianus and Alexander to make plans for the next This happened – Utrecht. We’ve had a bit of trouble finding a venue, getting financing and everything but it looks like we’re all set. Monday 4 October at Theater Kikker in Utrecht, NL. Save the date.

From Amsterdam I traveled on to Rotterdam and spent some time at Simon’s sketching out the additions to PLAY Pilots for the Wip ‘n’ Kip game data. I also dropped by BUROPONY. They might make something cool for This happened attendees…

Wednesday I had coffee with Thieu and Godelieve at the Westergasfabriek in Amsterdam to talk about a new project which I’ve dubbed Fugu. It deals with experimental (game-like) new forms of higher education. I am taking on board two interns to help me out with that. That’ll be an interesting new experience. I also hooked up with Peter, who is now at Adaptive Path Amsterdam. Cool building, they seem to be doing well. Nice.

In the afternoon on Wednesday I was back in Utrecht to talk to Ezra, who is involved with some interesting research into cycling. He’s based in Copenhagen. We discussed ways in which we might use low-tech pervasive urban games to shape cycle use. Who knows, Hubbub might venture there to do some experiments in future.

I finished that day off with a review of a student presentation. Final exams is next week; that’ll eat up a lot of my time.

Ah what’s more? Thursday, more educational work, I attended a kick-off of the new academic year at the HKU‘s school of art and technology. I liked the fact that all teachers were there and sat down to sync their classes and assignments in such a way that they all connected to projects students would be doing. Proper project-based art education. Good to see that happen.

And today I am reviewing one more student presentation and am spending some time with Alper on PLAY Pilots and related bits.

Looking ahead, next week will be about the aforementioned final exams and also the kick-off of project Maguro. I have to say I am running on fumes a bit and can’t wait for next week because on friday I will head to Terschelling for a week and unplug completely.

Almost forgot about Bocce Drift this Sunday. Come along and play.

Week 162

Slightly overdue so I’ll keep it (very) short.