Yesterday I attended the fifth edition of This Happened in Utrecht city. It was a great new iteration with more polish even though it was also a big step up moving the entire event to a new venue.
See the This Happened site for the presentations of this session.
The Papercakes presentation was interesting, though I would have wished that they’d focused more on the creative process and not so much on the implementation and user testing. It is a very compelling game and I’m now even more seriously considering buying a Bamboo for my desk.
The Love Hate Punch punching bag hit close to home for me as I used to have a bag like that at home and I definitely can relate to the aggression remediating effects of such a bag. It was an epic story of how to create something interesting using mostly home brew and tenacity.
The Swinxs is impossible not to like. The presentation was oddly paced, but still everybody thought it was great and got a great look behind the process of putting a digital toy on the store shelves (quite a feat!).
Daan Roosegaarde went off in all kinds of tangents talking about creating poetic interactions for public space. His installations are in a league of their own and are a custom designed experience for a certain area. I have experienced LiquidSpace but I had a hard time getting much more out of it than its novelty.
This Happens seems to have arrived at a next level with a space that is comfortable and organizers that are comfortable within that space. Let’s see what’s next.
Thanks for that nice writeup.
About the paper cakes. They do have some more videos up regarding the making of Paper Cakes
(a bit of Dock Puppet Marketing ;-).
The guys surprised me by saying that they did their Scrum using Bamboo Sapce (http://bamboospace.eu), another tool I created for Wacom which I often describe as my red-haired stepson (got to love him, but it is hard sometimes).
As far as Love Hate Punch goes. The process was actually very structured and with knowledge, the only part that was new territory was the electronics and specifically the interactivity part, but a lot of the focus in the story went into that.