{"id":1224,"date":"2008-12-15T23:18:25","date_gmt":"2008-12-15T21:18:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/leapfrog.nl\/blog\/?p=1224"},"modified":"2008-12-24T17:19:09","modified_gmt":"2008-12-24T15:19:09","slug":"what-i%e2%80%99ve-been-up-to-lately","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/leapfrog.nl\/blog\/archives\/2008\/12\/15\/what-i%e2%80%99ve-been-up-to-lately\/","title":{"rendered":"What I\u2019ve been up to lately"},"content":{"rendered":"

You might be wondering what\u2019s been going on at the Leapfrog studio lately, since I haven\u2019t really posted anything substantial here in a while. Quite some stuff has<\/em> happened — and I\u2019ll hopefully get back into posting longer articles soon — but for now, here\u2019s a list of more or less interesting things I have been doing:<\/p>\n

This happened \u2013 Utrecht<\/strong><\/p>\n

We had our first This happened \u2013 Utrecht<\/a> on November 3. I think we succeeded in creating an event that really looks at the craft<\/em> of interaction design. I\u2019m happy to say we\u2019re planning to do three events next year — all at Theater Kikker<\/a> in Utrecht — and we\u2019ve got lots of cool speakers in mind. If you want to make sure you won\u2019t miss them, subscribe to our newsletter<\/a> (in Dutch).1<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n

Teaching<\/strong><\/p>\n

My students<\/a> are nearing the end of their project. They\u2019ve been hard at work creating concepts for mobile social games with a musical component; they came up with 20 in total. Now they\u2019re prototyping two of them, and I must say it\u2019s looking good. They\u2019ll have to present the games to the project\u2019s commissioner — a major mobile phone manufacturer — somewhere the beginning of January 2009. I hope to be able to share some of the results here afterwards.<\/p>\n

Office space<\/strong><\/p>\n

Since December 1 I am a resident of the Dutch Game Garden<\/a>\u2019s Business Club. That means I now have a nice office smack in the centre of Utrecht<\/a>. The building\u2019s home to lots of wonderful games companies, some, like me, operating on the fringes — like FourceLabs<\/a> and Monobanda<\/a>. If you\u2019re curious and would like to drop by for a tour, a coffee and some conversation, let me know.<\/p>\n

Brainstorm<\/strong><\/p>\n

I was invited do help compose one of the cases for the ‘Grote Amsterdamse Waterbrainwave’. A one-day brainstorm in which 45 students from various institutions were asked to come up with water-related innovations that would make the Netherlands a significant global player once again. It was organised by the Port of Amsterdam<\/a>, Waternet<\/a> and Verleden van Nederland<\/a>2<\/a><\/sup>. I also attended the day itself as an outside expert on games and the creative industry in general. Read a report of the event<\/a> at FD.nl (in Dutch).<\/p>\n

Book<\/strong><\/p>\n

Dan Saffer<\/a>\u2019s book Designing Gestural Interfaces<\/a> has been published by O\u2019Reilly<\/a> and is now available. Turn to page 109<\/a> and you\u2019ll find a storyboard<\/a> by yours truly used for illustration purposes. That\u2019s the first time any work of mine is featured in print, so naturally I\u2019m quite proud. I have yet to receive my copy, but got a sneak peek this weekend and I must say it looks promising. If you\u2019re a designer needing to get up to speed with multi-touch, physical computing and such, this should be a good place to start.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s about it for now. There\u2019s a lot of exciting stuff in the works, the outcomes of which I will hopefully be able to share with you in 2009. <\/p>

  1. The creators of This happened in London<\/a> have been nominated for a best of the year award<\/a> by the Design Museum, by the way. Well-deserved, I would say! [↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li>
  2. A cross-media campaign aimed at increasing awareness of Dutch national history. [↩<\/a>]<\/span><\/li><\/ol>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    You might be wondering what\u2019s been going on at the Leapfrog studio lately, since I haven\u2019t really posted anything substantial here in a while. Quite some stuff has happened — and I\u2019ll hopefully get back into posting longer articles soon — but for now, here\u2019s a list of more or less interesting things I have … Continue reading What I\u2019ve been up to lately<\/span><\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[625],"tags":[687,104,15,388,37,688,689,246,448,97],"class_list":["post-1224","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","tag-admin","tag-books","tag-events","tag-leapfrog","tag-news","tag-office","tag-studio","tag-teaching","tag-updates","tag-work"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/leapfrog.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1224","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/leapfrog.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/leapfrog.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/leapfrog.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/leapfrog.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1224"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/leapfrog.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1224\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/leapfrog.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1224"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/leapfrog.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1224"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/leapfrog.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1224"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}