Product/Design

I was at a meeting this weekend by the Pop-up City and the documentary displayed about urban development fits into a wider recent trend where people kick the creative class and blame them for society’s ills. Usually the dreaded specter of gentrification is pulled out to show how apathetic and different and outright bad the Creative Class 1 are.

Monday

On Monday I let go a bunch of stalling side projects which were not going anywhere.

Another long form weeknote, history recapping brought by the fantastic Memolane service which aggregates my various media chronologically so I can quickly write this overview.

A new experiment, extended weeknotes combined with assorted reading and outtakes. I think this may be more fun for me to write and more fun for you to read.

Monday I went off exploring a fort for an upcoming Hack de Overheid event. The industrial scenery and weather at the sea locks of IJmuiden was positively apocalyptic that day.

Last week a bunch of visual progress was made on culiacán. Expect an August release on that.

We zijn al een tijdje bezig met Statlas en het is de hoogste tijd dat een eerste versie het daglicht ziet om te laten zien wat voor iets tofs we hebben gemaakt en te horen wat jullie ervan vinden. Dus voor jullie ogen: Statlas

Monday I did some support and then went off to the UvA to present on data journalism together with Stef.

Lifting choice quotes from the proceedings of the Berkman Hyperpublic event graciously compiled by Ethan Zuckerman.

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.

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?”

A busy week, maguro got completely finished and delivered to client. Culiacan managed to overcome the horrible Media Temple hurdle.

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.

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.

Maguro got its next test and nicely stood up to everything thrown at it.

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.

Busily so briefly.

Drive by-ing these notes twothree four days late. Yeah, these are those kind of weeks.

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.

Got some reinforcements at the office:

Last week was mired by the flu which made it a bad week for production (and only slightly less bad for meetings).

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.

Alle samples van Bandjesland staan online en het is af. En dat is —zoals ze zeggen— ‘a wrap’.

The quotable This Happened Utrecht #8.

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).

At the upcoming Le Guess Who? festival, hipsters will employ RFIDs for interesting purposes:

Het blijft toch een mooi gezicht om terug te kijken de Wip ’n’ Kip op Stekkerfest:

Stukjes schrijven zonder hyperlinks erin is gek, maar dat komt erbij kijken als het op krantenpapier gedrukt moet worden. In ieder geval is vandaag een stuk van mij gepubliceerd op de opinie-pagina van de nrc.next: “Dat moet toch beter kunnen? — Geef vervoersinformatie vrij.

Last week I attended the Design Mind Salon with Bill Buxton (our hero) as one of its speakers. I managed to jot down some quotes by him. All of these are paraphrases but they’re good ones:

Bits of Freedom did a terrific job hosting a salon with Eben Moglen this afternoon at The Hub. As Mr. Moglen did, I am going to take the liberty of assuming you already know who he is 1 and I’m going to proceed to write a biased view of the afternoon.

Ik was benieuwd naar wat gegevens van de OV-fiets, dus ik klom in de pen:

A short remaindered weeknote (a rather awesome event and dinner packed week indeed):

De laatste dagen staan een beetje in het teken van gelekte e-mailtjes van, naar en door invloedrijke mensen in Nederland. Een van de recentere is die van de nieuwe hoofdredacteur van het NRC, Peter Vandermeersch, naar zijn redactie, hieronder (via):

Yesterday the next ARCAM lecture was held in the Brakke Grond by Jurriaan van Stigt of the firm LEVS.

Dit fijne dubbelinterview met Kevin Kelly en Steven Berlin Johnson is nog wel het aardigst omdat het uitlegt waarom we Engels moeten praten.

Dit is interessant nieuws: “ANWB stapt uit overleg ov-chipkaart”.

Gisteren een potje Stereoscoop gespeeld op de Neude in Utrecht en daar een gigantische buit binnengehaald. Deze badges staan nu op mijn profiel te prijken:

Goal # I want to create a simple visualization tool for Processing so I can input a set of values for each Dutch municipality and then color a map based on those values.

Last week was mostly busy with getting http://playpilots.nl to talk nicely to the Stereoscoop live game and make stuff work (mostly) properly back and forth. Synchronizing physical installations with websites is always fun.

There’s a lot of stuff happening in the Dutch Data Scene and more communication and consolidation of efforts is in order.