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.

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