For the last few weeks I’ve spent time on creating and updating my portfolio and curriculum vitae, something I stopped doing a few years ago. This time, I didn’t want to make the site too hard to navigate. (The problem I have with many portfolio’s is that they present themselves as archives that consist of many metadata to filter and search by instead of a plain ol’ showcases.) Eventually, I chose the Indexhibit platform to build upon. Though, soon (and somewhat unconsciously) I started to edit most of the original settings and layout. I must admit: the CMS works perfectly as it is much more suitable for building portfolio’s than, for example, WordPress.

Hard-drive hiccups

When I just started to browse through my previous work, one of my major back-ups (a portable LaCie hard-drive), seemed to have crashed while plugging it out. With an unreadable disk, I was afraid to have lost every project I had worked on for the last five years. Fortunately, a disk recovery application did its work properly (though it prompted an inconvenient list of generated file-names), also, many files resided on the Google Mail servers as well. I’ll just take this incident as a note-to-self to install a few time-machines.

Launch

Anyhow, the portfolio is now up and running and filled with old and new work!

Cheers!

Disclaimer: I only tested the site in the Mac-versions of Firefox and Chrome. Please notify me when things appear broken in other browsers.

Last Monday, I attended at yet another edition (the seventh) of the This Happened series, events where (interaction) designers reflect upon their projects, work philosophy and developments in the field. After my experience with This Happened #6, I had high expectations (and the fact that this time reservations were close within 8 minutes instead of 2 didn’t affect this).

Ibb and Obb – The production of an indie-game

The first speaker of the evening, Richard Boeser, elaborated on the production of an indie game called Ibb and Obb. What started out as his graduation project his Industrial Design program in 2007, four years later, he had assembled a production team to work on the game – ranging from a programming studio (Codeglue) to a music composer (Kettel).

The is basically a side-scroll platform game with a strong emphasis on co-operative gameplay. As the game characters are able to traverse the top and bottom of the surface, they clear their path from enemies and obstacles. Report: This Happened #7 continued »

During the conference called Doors of Perception, held back in 2002 in Amsterdam, prof. Philip Tabor elaborated on the relations between creative thinking, virtuality and space. Although it focuses on architecture specifically, it applies well on contemporary new media technologies. Here’s one of the paragraphs that struck me:

We build up this semi-random cloud of mental stuff to equip ourselves with a continually updated ‘feel’ for events—so that, when in the hazy future a need or opportunity arises, facts and intuitions will hopefully fuse into patterns that allow us to take actions appropriate to their context. We also hope that, while wandering and wondering in this space, we might stumble across valuable facts or ideas which, had we sought them, might not have been found. Let’s call this imaginary cloud ‘a space for half-formed thoughts’.

The space Tabor describes reminds me of the current Twitter-sphere in which every user reports of daily activities and continually moves across various conversations. Concretely, the sphere is also bound to never actually conclude a discussion because of the pace of updates, decentralisation of conversations, and the relentless character limitation.

However, the space is neither a good or bad thing by definition, as Tabor concludes: “Vagueness is sometimes a virtue, and clarity is sometimes a vice”.

The entire transcript can be found here.

Psst. They're reading!

(This article was cross-posted on the Masters of Media blog).

Here’s the final version of my thesis (called ‘Persistence of Life-Streams – An Inquiry Into the Implications of Mixed Surveillance’) which covers the nature and implications of (participatory) surveillance in the field of social media, and specifically in life-streaming services like Twitter and Facebook. (PDF can be downloaded here). Thesis update: It’s here. continued »