Tag: Mount Everest

I’m writ­ing this in the morn­ing on a train from Utrecht to Ams­ter­dam. I’ll be mak­ing this trip more often the com­ing weeks, since I signed a con­tract with Layar on tues­day. I’ll be rein­forc­ing their UX team, doing inter­ac­tion design on exist­ing and new parts of their ser­vice. As is often the case with these kinds of engage­ments, there’s not much more I can say at this time. I’m sure there will be inter­est­ing things to show and talk about lat­er on though.

In the time that’s not being tak­en up by Layar this week I’m get­ting going with project Tako. I’ve been call­ing the orga­ni­za­tions select­ed for the project and sched­ul­ing meet­ings. The first one — with the peo­ple behind Uit­gekookt; a culi­nary fes­ti­val — is set for this fri­day. It’s a rare oppor­tu­ni­ty to talk about how you can bring a play­ful per­spec­tive to (in this case) cook­ing and food, I’m real­ly look­ing for­ward to it. More meet­ings will be hap­pen­ing next week.

Also on fri­day, I’ll attend an eval­u­a­tion of the Mount Ever­est project, which was wrapped up last week­end. I went over to the fac­ul­ty to see the pieces the stu­dents had cre­at­ed and was blown away by the cre­ativ­i­ty and tal­ent on display. 

If I had to pick one favorite it’ll have to be the group that set up a spoof shop — called Extreme­ly Safe — where you could come in and have your pic­ture tak­en at a haz­ardous loca­tion of your choice. It was a play­ful ser­vice — you real­ly did get that pho­to, plus a sheet of help­ful point­ers for telling the tale of your trav­els to friends and rel­a­tives — but once you were in, an impromp­tu per­for­mance took place too, com­ment­ing on con­tem­po­rary obses­sions with break­ing rules and push­ing limits. 

Good stuff.