Last Monday I paid an information architecture house call at a friend at one of the beleaguered (a somewhat redundant word when discussing print publications here) Dutch weeklies. Looking forward to advice taken to heart and maybe some online Dutch media that I can consume with pleasure.
Seeing this presentation in Amsterdam as the culmination of Mobile Monday, was something great. The far reaching vision and reality based optimism Kevin Slavin lays down (his comments) are something we should aspire to. It is worth watching and watching again.
We read Thoughts on Interaction Design 2nd edition as the fifth book for the UX Book Club Amsterdam and reviewed it yesterday. Here are my noteworthy passages from the book, which is not without its issues, but it does give a credible philosophical foundation for our practice.
Things are speeding up and these are taking too much time so I won’t know if I can keep it up. Still I think there is a lot of value in creating an archive of our work. And I think these have netted the most consistently positive response compared to other blogposts here.
I witnessed a discussion yesterday that stated that for creative industries to catch root in a certain area there is the need for trendy coffee shops. While that is a necessary condition indeed, it is not sufficient. The coffee produced in said shops also needs to be of excellent quality or at least miles better than whatever most stores in the Netherlands are pouring. The lovely folks over at BERG also have a post about it.
Lots of writing last week. We submitted the maguro project as a practice report to the DiGRA conference. Also wrote a bit of damage control on the Apps for Amsterdam contest regarding the implications of a certain submission: “Dude! Where’s my car?” Decisions made border on the ludicrous and it falls upon us as Hack de Overheid to choose the side of sanity. Finally I punched out some meta-writing about the conundrums of writing (or trying to write) for larger audiences: “Why write about games?”
Some of my own misgivings about whether to write about games and related phenomena or not are reflected in the critique of game criticism at Lost Garden.
Two years after I harrangued the Dutch national railways on radio about their closed data policy and debunked all their arguments why they would not open up this data.
The weekly bit of media consisted of a brief Radio 1 excerpt about the issue of new anti-piracy legislation. This is of course futile and I did my best to explain such in a couple of minutes and a blogpost.
It looks like the past period of turbulent ascent is over and the plane is going to be level for a bit. That does not mean that there isn’t an awful lot of awesome stuff on deck waiting to be published nor that there aren’t a bunch of new prospects on the horizon. More on those in due time.
There’s a bunch being said about Nicholas Carr’s book “The Shallows”. Most notably a lot of print media jumping onto the the Ever-Betters bandwagon. Obviously Carr stating that reading long form print is being drowned out by the internet is right up the alley of the old media in their death throes.
Last week Monday we saw the final work presentations at the Willem de Kooning Academy. It was a great experience and I was really blown away by the breadth of some of the work presented. Nevertheless it remains a challenge to fit a full data visualization curriculum within the course of 4 weeks. Given the time we had I am very proud of the progress made.
We spent last weekend having a veritable blast at the Cognitive Cities conference. It was a great spectacle of familiar faces, a nicely curated program and full frontal confrontations with the city of Berlin.
Heading out to the App in a Day event by Hack de Overheid and the VPRO yesterday morning, I was confronted by a rather complex series of actions I needed to do to get an OV-fiets.
Work # Made a lot of progress on Statlas during the course of the week. The domain should be live this week and we should see tangible results this month.
Solid progress on Maguro in Utrecht. Spent a large amount of time over there also to evaluate the PLAY Pilots project’s succes. Started building a prototype that runs more in real-time and on timed events (and all that in a traditional web framework).
For project Statlas, we kicked off the design framework with Alexander and made some good strides with that. Also met with Kilian for progress on the renderer. I acquired a small Python script from Henkjan that we were allowed to release as open source, a Rijksdriehoekscoordinatien to WGS84 converter. I had been meaning to write this myself, but felt we shouldn’t duplicate the effort.
Urbanode running from an Android Phone from VURB on Vimeo. The movie shows an Android phone controlling the stagelights at the Melkweg using a colour picker on a webpage.
I saw the movie Catfish which seems to have garnered a significant amount of attention and is in many ways the *real* Facebook movie because it actually takes place on facebook and addresses real issues we have all dealt with instead of the dealings of ultra-rich privileged kids at elite-universities.
I wanted to read Zero History and found out I hadn’t read Spook Country yet, so I did. Unfortunately Stanza does not allow a batch export of annotations, but fortunately I did not make that many.
I’m writing this sitting in a foggy Village Bagels in Amsterdam looking out onto the snowy streets. It’s been a while, and things are different than they were a year ago.
A busy week the last one, met with several people busy in the field of open transit data to the point of actively starting projects or planning to integrally solve the problem. Good to see that a lot of momentum (and perceived value) is in that space.
Last week was the first week that I was back from the Levant. I have notes for the three weeks in between, but I think I’ll skip those (though plenty of interesting stuff happened over there too).