Holland Futures

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Elevator portal to the Wonderland

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Playful Innovation

Philips Design published few materials about the use of ’serious games’ in design and innovation- see Playful Innovation on their site. There is a pdf describing one of such games – Spark, a small boardgame helping to generate new thoughts and ideas, creative, yet grounded in real life.

In another publication, Playing with Futures, about the use of serious games to explore possible futures, they mention another game, Building Futures.

[The] “game developed by Philips Design for Design Initiatief, a new Dutch organization helping businesses collaborate and co-create new future-proof solutions. In this game, different teams construct possible futures in an interactive and competitive way, using ideas as building bricks for their projects. Importantly, people not only ‘imagine’ new futures, but are also ‘live’ and ‘work’ in them – preparing and transforming themselves for new emerging realities.“

Zombies Always Win!

Looks like playing video games can *also* improve your memory – at least that what the ‘playful experiments’ by the Pivec Labs point to. The company developed a small, funny, yet necessarily scary game to measure your memory capacity (Phonological Zombies). The first results shows that “video gamers have a commanding grasp of memory over their non-gamer counterparts” – according Paul Pivec (Zombies Help Scientists with Memory).

To HAR or not to HAR?

Hacking at Random will be held in August 2009 (=soon), and I still didn’t make my mind on whether I should go this year or not. The program looks intense and interesting (as usual), but also very techy, at least for me. WikiLeaks looks provocative enough, and so does the (un)limited Design Contest, and so on, dozens of intriguing titles and names. Seemingly, the event also has its distinctive experiential flavor, an alleged ‘Woodstock for Geeks’.

A special attraction of the year – a silent disc shredder! Hmm.

Hell to Heaven, elevator pitch

Civilization, by Marco Brambilla, is a stunning video installation designed for the elevators of the Standard Hotel in New York.

“The video mural depicts a journey from Hell to Heaven interpreted through modern film language using computer-enhanced found footage,” writes Eric Melin who also compares this art+technology work with the epic visual narratives of the Garden of Earthly Delight by Hieronymus Bosch. “This epic video mural contains over 300 individual channels of looped video blended into a multi-layered seamless tableau of interconnecting images that illustrate a contemporary, satirical take on the concepts of Heaven and Hell.”

I like the idea of re-place-ing and re-playing this old, archetypical story in a hyper-modern context, and also enacting a dramatic Dante-like journey using a banal elevator. The most obvious reading of the journey is from Bottom to the Top (from the Past to the Future?), but in fact the spatial organization is more complex. Both Hell and Heave are the futures, and both are possible.

Wonder if they they heat the cabin when passing the Hell.

Freedom, Ghanified

Somehow I got to this gathering in Second Life, with, and about the Ghana speech of Obama. Usually it’s not my piece of cake, but via-via I got an invite (and then tp) from a friend from the crowd. The meeting was well-attended, I should say, although a higher than average proportion of Linden avatars pointed that one shouldn’t expect too much of political incorrectness or ‘playfulness’.

And yet I managed to find – if not full game, than at least some element of playful re-writing of the reality (which is what Second Life for, if you ask me). At some distance from the gathering venue there was a model of the US Capitol (no Capitol Hill though) – at least, the building was resembling the US Capitol enough for me to consider it as such.

But then my eye spotted on the top of the building a very interesting artifact, and not quite the Statue of Freedom

I really liked the way they appropriately modified (Ghanified) the statue, to fit the topic of the talk, kudos!

Are you an Alien?

The boy has his birthday party yesterday – it bit earlier that his ‘real’ BD is, but since all his friends will be on school holidays by then, we decided to throw in it June. The party plot was complex, and included teleportation through the portal (pictured above), multiple testing procedures to ensure that only ‘true’ aliens left in the crew, than the ‘flight’ to the ‘combat zone’ (=a local laser quest establishment), and then of course THE FIGHT!

Looks like PVP is still the best way to really immerse people into the futures

Lance hunts the gold. Lance – gnome, lol

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Masters’ Graduation Show

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