"I find one meeting can sometimes affect a whole day. A meeting commonly blows at least half a day, by breaking up a morning or afternoon. But in addition there's sometimes a cascading effect. If I know the afternoon is going to be broken up, I'm slightly less likely to start something ambitious in the morning. I know this may sound oversensitive, but if you're a maker, think of your own case. Don't your spirits rise at the thought of having an entire day free to work, with no appointments at all? Well, that means your spirits are correspondingly depressed when you don't. And ambitious projects are by definition close to the limits of your capacity. A small decrease in morale is enough to kill them off."

A Twitter bot that generates metaphors, as a response to Ian Bogost's Alien Phenomenology. "Essentially, I’m skeptical that we can ever have good metaphors for anything; or rather, anything can be a good or a bad metaphor. I think metaphorism requires someone to take the stance of a poet, to have confidence in metaphor. And a poet I am not…"

"De verlegenheid van de sociale wetenschappen in het aangezicht van de grootste crisis sinds 1929 is een alarmerend brevet van onvermogen; als je hier niets over te zeggen hebt ben je als sociale wetenschapper geen knip voor je neus waard. Dit is potdomme waar de sociale wetenschappen voor zijn opgericht: voor het doen van systematisch onderzoek naar de causale oorzaken van grote maatschappelijke crises en veranderingen. Jongens, dit is ‘the big one’, de crisis waar je je hele carrière naar hebt uitgezien, die je loopbaan betekenis en gravitas moet geven, en wat doe je? Je loopt er met een grote boog om heen, als was het weer zo’n gore rotrochel van de geschiedenis, net als de val van de muur en 9/11."

"This coming November, you may be one of the millions who will purchase Call of Duty: Black Ops II. Before you start fantasizing about a Los Angeles under drone attack and the undercover soldiers who will save us all, you may want to think about the horrifying history of undercover operations and the actuality of drone wars today." I'd love to see more critique of games along these lines.

"Tied in with this is the fact that each JS Joust game lasts a minute, maybe two – and that means you see the game end-to-end and over and over, embedding the whole structure in your mind. Short Sessions was Frank Lantz’s answer to pretty much every game design problem presented at last year’s Practice conference – and one of the things that Short Sessions enable is your audience to become ready participants. Tagging out of the game is as simple as handing your controller to another player." Solid analysis of why Joust works.

Copenhagers: RETRO BOBBY (by Copenhagers)

Exchange your old toys for a haircut from your childhood. It’s nostalgia on steroids, baby.

Alper pointed me to this slightly retarded but at the same time engrossing reinterpretation of the computer RPG: missions and enemies are laid out on a grid. You finish or defeat them by clicking repeatedly (shades of Cow Clicker here). Then hover over the XP and money that appears to cash in. To get to the harder ones you need to level up and purchase kit. There is no declarative layer what so ever but it still works. Strange.

Live feeds from fox dens. Inspirational material for my work on Pig Chase.

Amazingly overproduced and firmly stuck in the past, this toy store is yet another attempt at "play-washing" consumerism from the land of the free.

Even though the video shows actual gameplay I still have trouble imagining what it's like to play Miegakure, a game about a four dimensional world. Sure to be a unique experience.

An overview of strange Japanese social game genres. Like catnip for game designers.

I'm not sure I'm behind this approach but it's interesting nonetheless. A toolkit for building computer RPGs with an emphasis on "story". I wonder at what point a user would lose the overview of his brick-based creation.

“This coming November, you may be one of the millions who will purchase Call of Duty: Black Ops II. Before you start fantasizing about a Los Angeles under drone attack and the undercover soldiers who will save us all, you may want to think about the horrifying history of undercover operations and the actuality of drone wars today.”
- http://m.kotaku.com/5908216/the-trouble-with-call-of-dutys-scary-new-war-of-the-future

Refreshing analysis of the rise of populism in the Netherlands, arguing that it is not the result of politics bowing to gradual, natural change in society (the growing educational divide). But in stead, the result of the new right’s active campaign to influence public opinion. Which means that what is needed is active opinion shaping from other political movements, not pacification of populism.

"It's worth charting both profit per employee and owner satisfaction against the number of people in the organization. Perhaps getting a little bigger isn't what you want, and it might not even be possible." Having considered growing my business and deciding against it (at least for now) this is interesting reading. I certainly believe growth happens in leaps and can't always be organic.

Fascinating project exploring the possibilities of descriptive metadata for photos. This camera sends a photo to Mechanical Turk with a request to describe its contents. The description is sent back to the camera, which prints it on a receipt.

Philip K. Dick after seeing parts of Blade Runner:

“…this indeed is not science fiction; it is not fantasy; it is exactly what Harrison said: futurism. The impact of Blade Runner is simply going to be overwhelming, both on the public and on creative people — and, I believe, on science fiction as a field.”

For future reference, an overview of various joinery achievable with CNC routers or laser cutters.

Provides valuable insight into how Valve is run and why so many have told me it is a very special place to work.

Another entry into the 3D printing market. This Dutch startup is offering a reasonably affordable FDM printer aimed at consumers.

Just finished reading Alain de Botton’s The Architecture of Happiness. It is chockfull of worthwhile bits but towards the end are a few that I’ll just highlight. These offer a nice way of thinking about culture and how it can be actively changed.

Contrary to the Romantic belief that we each settle naturally on a fitting idea of beauty, it seems that our visual and emotional faculties in fact need constant external guidance to help them decide what they should take note of and appreciate. ‘Culture’ is the word we have assigned to the force that assists us in identifying which of our many sensations we should focus on and apportion value to.

(Emphasis mine.) And further on, some notes on how cultural works can legitimize tastes otherwise kept private:

For all that we mock those fake aesthetic enthusiasms in hopes of gaining respect, the opposite tendency is the more poignant, whereby we repress our true passions in order not to seem peculiar. […] It is books, poems and paintings which often give us the confidence to take seriously feelings in ourselves that we might otherwise never have thought to acknowledge.

I like the encouragement to be public about the things you like but feel self conscious about. Those are probably the most interesting things. That might actually a good guideline for what to post here.

And to Botton’s list I’d add games and other contemporary aesthetic forms of course.

I really enjoyed reading this while at the same time seeing the whole New Aesthetic thing really take off. De Botton points out not much is needed to kick off a new movement:

A few buildings and a book have usually been sufficient to provide viable models for others to follow.

Or, you know, a tumblr and a few hacks. You don’t need a lot of cash to make a cultural movement happen. But you do need to be persistent.

In all of these tectonic shifts, the tenacity of the prime movers was every bit as important as the resources at their disposal.

So, persist.

"If I see whatever I’m currently doing as just another stop along the way, then I think I’m on the right path." Curtis has just passed away. Reading this interview I guess it is safe to say he leaves behind a rich and varied oeuvre.

Having been largely raised on Bowie I can't help but be fascinated by his music and his personality. This discussion of two recent books on his career make for a long, rewarding read. If only for the revelation that the chorus for 'Starman' borrows heavily from 'Somewhere over the Rainbow'.

A civic engagement platform that makes heavy use of points for motivation. I wonder if the thing is the success this article suggests it is and if that is because of the points system or something else entirely.

"But then I realised that games have given me a lot of other experiences that aren’t that feeling. I remember playing Secret Of Mana when I was a kid, and that bit at the start where you’re thrust into the wilderness and you’re just looking around trying to find a town: that feeling’s amazing, and it’s not something I’ve ever got from art." Love the fact Gage mentions SoM as an example of a powerful game experience. It certainly grabbed me by the throat when I first played it.

(via Sarah van Sonsbeeck, artist)

Not too long ago I read Charles Stross’s Glasshouse, in which a faraday bag figures heavily. Leave it to artists like Sarah to make sci-fi a reality.

"Mission Island is XTeam Training LTD’s exclusive virtual training game, designed to strengthen collaboration among business teams in complex environments, improve agility and conflict resolution skills, and develop managers into superior leaders. The game is simple to play and implement, as well as an incredibly efficient teaching tool and a lot of fun.  Teams from five to fifteen members must complete tasks together, overcome obstacles and adjust to rapid changes on a virtual deserted island.  A keyboard and mouse are all that’s required, and a game is completed in only twenty-five minutes." An interesting example of an applied game that is offered as a service.

(via stfj 3.0)

This attempt to build in more non-verbal cues into text chat reminds me of Matt Webb’s Glancing.

“This idea of labour being hidden in things, and the value of things arising from the labour congealed inside them, is an unexpectedly powerful explanatory tool in the digital world. … When you start looking for this mechanism at work in the contemporary world you see it everywhere, often in the form of surplus value being created by you, the customer or client of a company. Online check-in and bag drop at airports, for example.”
-

Marx at 193 ( 2 Apr., 2012, at Interconnected)

This reminds me a lot of Tesler’s Law which states that the complexity inherent in a system is constant and can only be shifted from product to user or back.

Also found in this week’s Groene: amusing commentary from a Syrian woman on amusement park the Efteling. “You Westerners must be bored.”

Interesting piece in this week’s Groene on John Berger’s book Why Look at Animals. The quote refers to the seemingly contradictory attitude farmers have to their animals: they appreciate them for the live beings they are as well as for the product they become. Something I can relate to, despite being an urbanite who according to Berger can’t really understand.

“retro ’80s graphics are sentimental fluff for modern adults who grew up in front of 1980s game-console machines. Eight-bit graphics are pretty easy to carve out of styrofoam. There’s a low barrier-to-entry in making sculpture from 8-bit, so that you can “rupture the interface between the digital and the physical.” However 8-bit sculptures are a cute, backward-looking rupture.”
-

An Essay on the New Aesthetic | Beyond The Beyond | Wired.com

Which is also what I find so tiresome about much of indie game aesthetics today.

(via 314 - Watch the Road: World’s Earliest SatNav | Strange Maps | Big Think)

So good. At first sight I assumed this was some kind of retro movie prop.

"The collections of the National Museum of Play include hundreds of thousands of historical objects related to play, including the world’s largest and most comprehensive collection of dolls, toys, and games."

A game cabinet cobbled together from handed down parts was transported through Oakland as part of an Occupy rally. The twist: people could play on it for the duration of the trip (and helped out getting it to its destination in the process).

New Fashion Aesthetic:

I’m reading De Botton’s The Architecture of Happiness at the moment. Its discussion of the things that determine taste has lead me to wonder what it is people find appealing about the New Aesthetic. A lot of the discussion about it is very cerebral. “What is it?” etc. What I’m interested in is: why do we find it interesting / beautiful / etc. Because after all, “There are as many styles of beauty as there are visions of happiness.”

(via Paleofuture - Paleofuture Blog - 1999 A.D. (1967))

What’s jarring about this clip is not how they got the tech wrong: “Most food will be stored frozen in individual portions. […] The various portions are fed automatically into the microwave oven for a few seconds of deep thawing or warming.” Sounds about right.

No, what irks me is the extrapolation of a Mad Men like culture of female servitude to men doing absolutely nothing. I guess that’s where future visions go wrong mostly. Tech almost seems more predictable than the culture surrounding it.

"In this audio-only game, players don a mask that obscures their vision and takes over their hearing, plunging them into a world of blackness occupied only by the sound of their own breathing and the rumbles made by unseen terrors." Sounds like an intense game. Would love to try some time.

Some striking examples of procedural architecture and product design.
Makes me wonder when our UIs will catch up with this aesthetic. The
point about using traces left by tools such as laser cutters for

Iskander looks back on 13 editions of This happened in Utrecht with some personal highlights.

Interview (in Dutch) with the creators of Exactitudes, a project cataloging subcultural fashion codes.

(via Sci-Fi Airshow: Eagle 4)

Found this through Matt Jones. Love the way the copy is written in a very ambiguous way. What they’re saying is yes, this is about exhibiting props from movies, but they do fly! Nice and confusing.

“I deeply respect American sentimentality, the way one respects a wounded hippo. You must keep an eye on it, for you know it is deadly.”
- The White Savior Industrial Complex

Mimosa: a space divider in thin air on Vimeo:

Nice restrained interaction design project by Sebastiaan Pijnappel. Some comments on the design from a Co.Design article:

He [Pijnappel] says he took special inspiration from laying amidst high grass in a park.

“As you lift your head up slightly you can just about see a few people walk by. You see them, but they don’t see you, or at least that’s the sense of security and privacy you have,” he says, “You lower your head back down and everyone and everything is blocked from your sight again. Just as easily, swiping the grass halms aside exposes you, putting you in the same space as them and allowing you to say hi.”

This, and what follows when you click “follow him”, is indeed a small but wonderful example of what comics on the web can do. (Pointed to by Russell in this post who got it from Matt.)

“Maybe we’ve been so busy breaking the 20th century recording industry’s machinery that we’ve forgotten to invent truly new, 21st-century music.”
-

Music For Shuffle Sketch #09

Been reading up on this fascinating project by Matt Brown. Short bits of music that fit together randomly and are thus suited to playing on shuffle mode.

Turns out fighting bulls is kind of hard. Surprise Bullfight by Messhof. The dodging and stabbing is quite well done here. It has a nice looseness to it, similar to NIDHOGG’s duels.

"The objective of CV Dazzle is to adapt to our new environment and explore ways of communicating with machines to control our privacy in public." A classic project. I love the merger of cultural sensibility with tech savviness and utility.

"Devilish YouTubers have figured out a way to use it to lash out at critics. Since botting can get you kicked off of YouTube, and Google is now paying more attention to bot usage, the tactic is simple: Hire a company to bot your enemy’s videos, then watch Google’s enforcers do your dirty work and ban them from the site for botting." A lovely example of algorithms being used by non-experts for petty purposes.

"Because a line has been crossed, technology/software/code is in and of the world and there’s no getting out of it. Some architects can look at a building and tell you which version of autodesk was used to create it. The world is defined by our visualisations of it. (Someone who makes such things told me: what they put in, even as place-holders, always ends up getting built. Lorem Ipsum architecture.)" James on the essential weirdness of a world saturated with technology. What I like most is the way he ascribes agency to the things comprising the nonhuman parts of the network.

Odd bit of video which apparently records the first encounter between Belgian film-maker Jean-Pierre Dutilleux and a Papuan tribe which had never come into contact with “the white man”.

What disturbs me is the fact that, except for the bit at the end, the soundtrack is replaced with some type of world music. It’s also impossible to tell to what extent this is staged.

But it did make me try to imagine never having seen yourself in a mirror. And the bit at the end, where tribesmen play with a tape recorder does have sound, and is therefore by far the most interesting.

Jean-Pierre Dutilleaux (via The tribe of Toulambis comes first into contact with white | VideoMan)

"An awareness not only that all our actions are being monitored silently (typically in an otherwise benign fashion by way of the digital trails we leave) or not (in the case of systems like CCTV installations) but that they have become the triggers to actions for which there is no warning."

"This one-day workshop will take a playful approach to exploring how low-cost materials and tools can be used to manage personal visibility in monitored public space by designing and testing prototypes for rendering people invisible, using craft and physical hacks to explore the limits of computer vision tracking systems (OpenCV). By explicitly engineering modes of failure, we can learn how visibility and invisibility can be managed, while also considering potential improvements in robust tracking for interaction design." Curious to see what might come out of this beyond the now well-known CV Dazzle. Also, on a more general note, pushing a system 'till it breaks is a useful design strategy beyond this specific case.

"A healthy product company is, confusingly, one at odds with itself. There is a healthy part which is attempting to normalize and to create predictability, and there needs to be another part that is tasked with building something new that is going to disrupt and eventually destroy that normality." What rings most true in this piece is the pressure people put on mavericks to conform to the status quo.

"Today a firm can consist of distributed individuals or small groups who come together when needed, but otherwise are free to pursue their own enterprises." Which is true to a large extent but the rest of this dream has distinct Randian overtones and is lacking in realism.

Excellent lecture from Frank Lantz on how games are an aesthetic form centered on interactive systems, and how they are not "tidy rectangles" but more like cities, languages and rituals.

A revealing look at the workings of the contemporary American manufacturing industry. What's most striking is that it seems one can no longer bootstrap oneself out of an unskilled job into a skilled one.

"the world does not need more software houses: software is far too often a way of avoiding doing useful work, of sidelining bright people. Rather, the world needs more people doing things, building physical things, and merging hardware and software in useful and unexpected ways." On why fab labs are not good enough when it comes to sparking a new maker industry. Towards the end I was a bit puzzled by the seeming privileging of atoms over bits but other than that some good points.

It's not often a retrospective makes me want to go back and play a game I missed the first time.

"...without realising it we, and our leaders, have given up the old progressive dreams of changing the world and instead become like managers – seeing ourselves as components in a system, and believing our duty is to help that system balance itself. Indeed, Curtis says, “The underlying aim of the series is to make people aware that this has happened – and to try to recapture the optimistic potential of politics to change the world.”" Nice overview of Curtis' series of documentary films on the influence of technology on contemporary thought, which i found quite fascinating.

This idea of "Indie Business" makes a lot of sense to me. It's what I'm shooting for with Hubbub to a large extent.

"Thousands of citizens across Europe are having their lives ruined and their children’s prospects blighted because a financial elite, once burned, is too shy to think out of its box. It refuses to stimulate demand merely because that is not the done thing to do."

"The hot field of happiness economics argues, rather persuasively, that once people reach some level of comfort, they are willing — even eager — to trade in potential earnings at a lucrative but uninspiring job for less (but comfortable) pay at more satisfying work." On the emergence of small-scale artisanal manufacturers.

"Nowadays I’m more intrigued by how you can effect change from inside the industrial machines so you have scale and you have influence. I’m not convinced it’s possible, but if you can whisper the right incantations in the ears of people who can sign-off on good new less crappy stuff, there’s an opportunity."

"One of the most basic ideas in Rules of Play is that we can look at games from multiple and contradictory points of view. And furthermore: that this is the right and proper thing to do with such a complex phenomena as games." Zimmerman does away with the notion of the existence of a hardcore dogmatic formalist belief in the magic circle. He also quite welcomely emphasizes the need to embrace ambiguity in understanding games, and that the value of theoretical concepts for designers lie in their applicability, not their ultimate truth (the application itself being the responsibility of the designer, no the theoretician).

Heart-wrenching account of a migrant family trying to make a living from selling dumplings in the streets in China.

"Bushwaffle are playful personal inflatables that transform the urban surface from hard to soft, impersonal to intimate, businesslike to social."

"people are now able (through Grasshopper or Processing libraries) to use algorithms they don’t understand. When this happens, algorithms control you rather than being a building block in your own creative process"

"heavy use of standard algorithms is bad for you. That is, it is if you wish to consider yourself a computational creative capable of coming up with interesting work"

"These tableaux have become the canned photo-documentary short-hand of what happens in incubators – people draw useless diagrams in front of bewildered clients, others sip coffee and check their Facebook accounts and far too many wear dated clothing because they’re too busy to concern themselves with sartorial detail."

Inventive games that attempt to mirror physical difficulties in control schemes.

This guy makes skillful use of twitter to report on uprisings and other major events.

"But its (Zelda's) spirit might be saved, so that old Zelda hands like myself might dream of Hyrule, and its secrets, again.  Isn’t that what we want?  For games to get deep inside of us, to restructure our consciousness, to reroute our labyrinthine nerves, to resonate with our captive hearts, to matter?  The way legends do."

"When governing bodies look at the Internet, they see its unruliness. But most of the swirl of the Net is in fact governed by rules so deeply implicit that even to surface them would disrupt the creative social work underway. The overwhelming preponderance on the Net of tacit governance over explicit is a sign of the Net’s depth, importance, humanity, health and success."

Nonsensical sadistic version of soccer in which players are randomly shocked during the match.

Interesting social design contest around networks and news.

"We know that breakthrough insight likely requires intense, individual reflection. We also know that criticism unlocks creativity. And finally, we know that creativity can be fostered by a certain type of physical space."

"Talentontwikkeling is van groot belang, maar maatschappelijke posities zullen nu eenmaal altijd ‘hiërarchisch’ worden verdeeld. Ook dat kenmerkt een open samenleving, zij het dat die verdeling niet langer gebaseerd is op afkomst. Maar die verdeling – en dat is de slag die we als samenleving nu moeten maken – mag niet samenvallen met minder waardering, beperkte toegang tot netwerken of gebrekkige zeggenschap."

Gorgeous illustrations of city-like structures.