This game and many others like it saved me from a boring school life. While lessons passed by, i was busy dreaming up my next characters, plans for campaigns and even sketching up the blue prints to some home made fantasy game systems. My mum often likes to taunt me about my old habits when around her friends, telling them about the trips and detours she would have to make to take me to Games Workshop to buy strange dice and weird books.

Living in a world dominated by computer games, i can’t emphasize enough the story-telling and communal theatre-making aspects that don’t exist in MMORPGs, even if they are also great to play. Gaming across a table led to gaming via mail (snail mail). Sounds boring, was actually wonderfully rewarding, even with the disjointed distances of time, waiting for your hand-moderated “turn”(example gm reply to one) to be processed. I think the fact that i paid for these “turns” also added to the tension. Playing-by-mail differed from table hosted campaigns like D&D, in that we played in a shared universe of sometimes up to thousands of players, in 1985! In a sense they were the forbearers of contemporary MMORPGs. I used to love turning up as a teenager at conferences and meet up with the people behind the players or parties playing or sometime famous in these shared universes created via paper and stamps. Our forum was a monthly zine which listed rankings and news items. Some of my favourite (hand-moderated) play-by-mail games included: Saturnalia, Crassimoff’s World, and another game, name forgotten although remember letting the GM crash at my place as he was from Sheffield and had to ask my mum for permission for him to couchsurf.

What play-by-mail games teach you indirectly is creative writing, expanding your imagination (by becoming someone else), and how to deal with others. I guess MMORPGs are taking collaboration to another level entirely (as military industrial complex is studying them!), although they don’t have the writing and character development that comes with RPGs around the table or via mail.

I’m toasting you Gary Gygax tonight for inventing the RPG!

[UPDATE] …and many more have been writing about it here and here

Picnic conference just passed, and it was good to see some old friends return and a few locals come back from their holidays. Ben gave a fantastic talk on “Play”, while Robert did a great job on the “portable social networks” session which was packed. Let’s hope after all the hubbub dies down that the crews from Jaiku and Twitter follow through with their promises and others continue to focus on making some kind of protocol to enable portable social networks to become a reality!

This last week has been a chin-down-get-on-with-it kinda time to complete all outstanding work and clear the decks for leaving for a small vacation. For those of you who don’t know, i’ve been working on:

Fuga
Where i work 2 days a week as an interaction designer and usability guy, where we are working hard on solving supply-chain problems in the music business as it digitizes rapidly.

Actics
Yes, the graphic design kinda sucks, but ethics as social objects combined to issues, people and groups is a proving a fascinating design challenge. Again…wishing/praying the web-design improves over there.

In the works is also an update for BeroepsEer. This is a network site that is helping support public sector workers across different sectors deal with continual change. Many people serving the government are feeling undervalued and their skills underutilized. It’s a place for them to drop their knowledge, report problems and suggest ideas.

There’s also a buzz running through our Roomware project. Really excited to see where this leads.

Enjoy the autumn leaves. I’ll be doing that too, and see you all soon!

Last weekend i was with friends visiting the opening of the 5-yearly art festival called Dokumenta that takes place in Kassel, Germany. For those of you not up with the program in contemporary art circles, this event is a big deal. Something to do with it being one of the oldest and first major art events. People call it the 100 day museum. Ok now that you are orientated on with this post.

This Dokumenta which is the 12th, one of the world’s most innovative chefs was asked to come and present his work, Ferran Adria. This was mouthwatering in that it was a chance to see what he would do at such an event outside his modus operandi at his restaurant in Spain. It was also a good way to profile art that is outside the normal framework of what we are used to. He has contributed to the culinary arts and will probably go down in history as a modern day Escoffier for his contributions. So shock horror, arriving in Kassel, i find out that he is no longer coming. A day later at the press office i asked what had happened. The official version of their story was that he just “couldn’t make it” and to make up for this, random people would be selected and send to his restaurant for a free dining experience and that this would happen throughout the 100 days…(not sure how many people would end up there). I heard that there was more on this covered by Der Spiegel

I was disappointed and have a few thoughts of my own for the Dokumenta organizers. I realize that the huge crowds that come to this event make the idea of food as an experience there quite daunting, but there is a way to do it. The organizers could have made this work with the right planning. I don’t accept any excuses for this not happening short of family deaths, the usual serious reasons why people pull out. Let this be a challenge to future art curators, to make the necessary preparation to pull of what i believe needs further attention, the culinary arts contribution to contemporary art. The show was a feast for the eyes and there was also a lot of lackluster work on show. At least let our tongues and brains be challenged rather than wearing out our eyes.

It’s another tuesday morning and back to my usual duties which as most of you probably know means working part-time for independentip on their new Fuga platform. So onto my report of the Reboot

The conference was quite different to any other i have yet been to. This was due to their being a clever, “boring people” removal filter. no middle managers. The other was the format. Instead of the usual 90% keynote/10% open submission, reboot was 55% keynote/45% open. Their website was running an instance of Mediamatic’s social engine. It was the most socially good feeling and interactive conference site i have ever used, allowing me to make a profile, add friends, add talks i was interested in, and leave comments on the event pages created for each talk before their speakers even got on stage.

What i really enjoyed were the workshops. These were conversations led by a host. Anyone could join in. These proved to be interesting, emotional and exploratory journeys into the subject created by all those at the event. I left these sessions having raised questions and received responses and back and forth engagements between us all. These experiences firstly stayed longer in my memory and left me with new questions and learnings which somehow stay with me unlike the keynote speeches. Keynotes are a special case. They are great with an authentic and effective communicator who makes it easy to want to listen while teaching you something entirely new. Unfortunately nothing was new enough for me, maybe reading too many feeds to blame:)

I also decided to host a conversation on “personal relationships – an un-Dr Phil approach“. Hey, the theme was “human”. I had to do something. We basically shared, and the framework we used was the stage of a relationship you are in. So first your are single, then in the early phase and then in a mature phase. I’m writing a separate report on the workshop.

Tijs and I also demonstrated our project from the Roomware team in NL, a server and application, Flickr_Pickr, which makes a slide-show from people’s photographs scooped from people’s Flickr accounts and “discovers” people via blue-tooth. Change your phone’s blue-tooth ID to you Flickr ID and you just added a part of you to the experience.

To keep things short as i’m short of time, i met a lot of great people and enjoyed Copenhagen,

This last weekend i arrived at my girlfriend’s house and as i walked in the door i noticed she had a box sitting on the stairs. It was sports monitoring gear to help her in the gym or running. It monitors your heart beat and then can create a series of workouts based on time. I tried it on and could get the watch to register the heart monitoring belt. I wanted just to see my beating heart registering on the watch screen. After pressing a few buttons, i was still unable to get my heart beat showing. Pissed off i scanned through the manual which was complicated with no entry on “press button to see heartbeat”. Perhaps i am stupid user, or perhaps the kit was just too complicated. What i would like is my heartbeat delivered to me all the time.

All the time. Yes, all the time. Why do i want a continual stream of data that contains my heartbeat? Well, after discovering heartbeat sensor technology, it dawned on me that there is presently a distinction between autonomous body data and that produced via cognitive processing(taking pictures, writing text, saving links, search, responding in speech). The data feeds that we have only very recently been able to create are in 99% of occasions processed via the brain. Where is the body? When was the last time you had to remind yourself to breathe?

The obvious choice for a body feed or bleed, would be the heart. We have reasonably cheap technology to measure it. Wait. It’s still locked up. Well sort of. A brief google later. Most heart monitoring kits (sensors and software) are embedded within medical or sports contexts . Only one company i found was porting this to the web, although there must be many more. I suspect that hospitals are using some kind of tool to record heat beat and blood pressure wirelessly. Will anyone help pipe us our heatbeats in a feed format? Sure it will need some hardware but please lets bring it out cleanly stripped from any specific context. Let’s see what people would do with that. It starts to get interesting when we overlay out heartbeat feed over the rest of our attention-stream. Hmm.

(thanks for the CC-Sharealike pics people split-milk radek reks rev dan catt)

Another pathway of experience design comes through the serving of food and is decanted via the evolution of restaurant cultures. The bleeding edge of cooking is a hive of sensory activity. The willingness and understanding of restaurant chefs to want to surprise and break assumptions, coupled with the abstraction and decoupling of flavor from its mother-form is providing for wild leaps of faith. New techniques and new tool kits have arrived thanks to chefs seeking out chemists and machine makers for collaborative benefit. Chefs can now embed flavor into materials not heard of before, while eradicating the separation of salt for maincourse and sweet for dessert. Foams, bubblebaths, gels, condensates, crunches never snowboarded before, hot and cold waves like physists seeking out new quantum materials. Environmentals like smoke or other textured or fragrant materials. The only remnants to an older time are the waiters. Surely more theatrical and narrative heavy experiences are soon to appear.

Biggest regret in my life so far: Having to turn down and stagiere position at El Bulli. (I could not get out of other committments…a painful lesson.)

Nevertheless, if i had done that then i would not be where i am now which i really can’t complain about. Actually i feel lucky to be able to work on fascinating projects with clients or together on collaborations with friends. Food has not left forever. Personally i would like to integrate the learnings from working with food and experience across to what i do now which is so similar. Here’s a promise to reengage with the sensory richness of food and theatre.

Video is of Alinea restaurant in Chicago, and you can take a look at their R&D here. El Bulli is located in Rosas, Spain.

Barely up and running, but boy is it good to get started. I have been working on this project which has been 6 months or more in the making, so it is an absolute pleasure to quietly put out to sea. Curious to see how people respond beyond the initial teething troubles from small bugs here and there. What is it? It’s a social network for people working inside public services. No it’s not got reviews of bands and people playing music, with crazy photos of teenagers pozing in the mirror with a 45 degree facial close up shot. It’s where people working in public services go to hang out and find each other, where they can let off some steam, and share war stories, and of course, find new solutions to fix the problems they face each day caused by bureaucracy (amongst other things) while serving the public. This is a dutch-language and dutch centered service for those of you from outside the Netherlands.

Welcome to the world of BeroepsEer!(translates to working pride in your particular craft)

What it includes for those hungry for the functionality laundry list is:
- profiles
- groups
- events
- blogging (individual, groups, everyone)
- video blog (send us your uploaded video interviews/opinions on your perspective)
- presentation of discussion, people, groups, institutions over location (googlemaps)

did i miss anything?…probably…also we did not build messenging in the first version which is a sort of standard social networking functionality for people to talk with each other inside the network.

I just received some mail, from a group called glasvezelamsterdam (glass fiber). They tell me that my neighborhood is getting an infrastructure upgrade and that i’m viable for glass fiber, allowing me to reach speeds of upload and download 10x faster than broadband today, up to 100 Mbps theoretically. I went to their site and found a list of companies selling fiber connectivity in multiple forms from single(Internet connection) to double(+telephony) to triple(+iptv) play. What was interesting was to see their prices and also compare these to my present dsl provider.

So right now i spend:
8 Mbps download, 1 Mbps upload speed – 55,86 euro/month
telephony – one phone line – 12,56 eur/month
tv – 16.80 euro/month

So with new services i could get:
20 Mbps up/down – 35 euro/month
telephony – 5 euro/month

So i could already save about 30 euro a month and get double the speed, a huge improvement in speed all round. The truth is that i don’t really experience a huge lag in download times right now. Although perhaps if i were connected to an internet tv experience that might be so. It would be fun to try out a fiber connection. I’m actually more interested in trying WiMax as that allows for all my mobile devices to be connected using just a wiMax box at home to send me my own bandwidth to up to a few kilometers away. Shazaa!

Saw an interesting talk by Matt Bidulph at Mediamatic the other night. He presented his latest work for Nature and an overview of how fabrication technologies are easy to experiment with in the virtual universe of Second Life. He was able to take the dataset of a cell tomagraph and get Second Life’s replicator bot to print a huge version of the cell image allowing people on Nature’s Second Life island to walk around it.

This tied in with a BBC feature on a IBM researcher who found a way to connect a doorbell in Second Life ringing, into sending the owner of that door an SMS message to tell them someone was calling.

Moved operations for Lifesized over to this new site. Just needed something new after having an old site which showed mainly Flash animation work and general design stuff. So what’s new? Well i’m an information architect and a “how to make our site more social” kinda guy.

Here’s a few ways how i might be able to help you

1. Information architecture
2. Designing and developing an online platform
3. Blogs/wiki’s explained
4. Building for the Internet of Things