1. Apparently, the name is a German pun on ’spaceship captain’ / ’spaceship earth’ and inspired by Buckminster Fuller’s Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth.

I’ve just flipped the switch on a new version of the website. This site replaces the placeholder site that was up for a while and should be a big improvement. However, as with everything on the web, it will never be finished. So we plan on making adjustments over the coming weeks and months. Surely, bugs will need fixing – if you spot any, do let us know. Content needs some tweaking here and there to accommodate the new design as well. We’ll get around to that soon.

For now, this should serve us fine when it comes to keeping you involved in our activities. So the next post will be about more interesting things, like this new project we’ve landed with the city of Utrecht. Stay tuned!

As you can see, there are nine variants. Each has an illustration of a fox doing, well, something on the front, plus a quote. The quotes all relate to the nature of reality in some way.

Part of the card can be taken out. As you can see in the following photo:

The part that is removed could be kept as a reminder. What remains is similar to a view finder. You can look through it and take photos of people, adding their faces to the fox bodies.

We went around during the conference doing exactly this. A selection of the photos we took of people can be seen below:

The rest of this post is a description of the making of these cards, with a focus on the role sketching played in the design. I’m posting this because we more or less stumbled across this form of play by accident. However, we manipulated circumstances so that this accident, this serendipitous encounter of an interesting form of play, was bound to happen. I think this is a trick of much value to designers of games and playful experiences.

Brief

We were asked by Roger ter Heide, chair of Game in the City, to create something playful for the conference. The idea was to have something that could serve as a conversation topic. People have a lot on their minds at conferences, so a full game was out of the question. We could however introduce a layer of obscurity, so that interested people could attempt to discover the rules that would govern the thing.

Mobiles and paper

(Not “mobiles” as in mobile phones, but mobiles as in the form of sculpture made famous by Alexander Calder.)

After an initial round of brainstorming we decided it would be interesting to see if we could get people to build things out of parts we would distribute. We thought we could hand out paper cards from which parts could be removed. These would combine to form characters or other things, which in turn could be placed on a designated surface, or better yet, hung from a huge mobile we would provide. Here’s a concept sketch illustrating the idea:

So this was all bout casual construction. We also anticipated people might get into bartering for parts, or start working in teams to create the coolest possible thing.

Having received a green flag for this idea. We bought some metal wire and some nice card board and sat down to experiment. It very soon became clear that constructing mobiles is no joke. Here’s a failed attempt by myself to create something passable in miniature:

So we ditched this part of the plan. No way were we going to successfully create a mobile that would look good and work well in the available time.

Paper craft puppets and business card holders

What remained of the idea was constructing things, puppets for instance, from paper. At a subsequent session, we gave ourselves a few hour to fiddle with card board to see what we could come up with. We built obvious instantiations of the initial idea, which worked, but weren’t very interesting:

Playing around with these puppets, we discovered another direction; using them as business card holders. Here’s a photo of one example:

We abandoned this idea too though, since we didn’t see the conference’s target audience exchanging business cards using puppets. I’m sure you’ll agree.

Stumbling across the cards

It was during this same session that Julius cut a hole in a piece of card board and drew a very rough rendition of a character on it. Here’s a photo of the the man in question using this very early prototype of what would become the Hubbub card:

We continued tinkering with this idea. Creating a version that had a removable top, for instance:

It was clear this added feature would only make for more hassle and did not add much to the fun. So we settled on the simple, original version. And made a few more models. Like this one:

So by playing around with the materials we would ultimately be working in, we came across an interesting form of play. The specific type of play we ended up with emerged more or less by accident. But choosing to sit down and tinker with the stuff the eventual product would be made of was a conscious decision.

I’ve left out several other options we generated during these sessions. We went for quantity, not quality. Here’s a photo of more of the things we made:

Sketching the cards and production

What was left for us to do was plan the cards for production. We had to figure out what kind of illustrations would go on them and how many variations we wanted to do. (Initially, I thought it would be cool to go for 23 variations. Ultimately we settled for nine.) We also wanted to add some text to each card, so we had to come up with something suitable there.

Since the cards would double as calling card for Hubbub (which we planned to sort-of-launch at the conference) we thought it would be suitable to go with foxes as characters for the illustration. (Reynard the Fox is our trickster figure of choice.)

Thematically, we thought it would be interesting to play off the AR hype. The cards would be our take on augmented reality, and show that true augmentation happens between people’s ears. To underscore this, the illustrations would be a bit surreal and the texts would be witty quotes commenting on the subjective nature of reality.

Both Karel and I explored many, many variations for the foxes. We thought it was important the foxes would be doing stuff, because play is about verbs. (I went through a large list of hobbies for this.)

Karel did a great job on the final set of illustrations. From this point onwards we handed over to our friends at BUROPONY. They did all the graphic design of the cards, and handled the printing.

I’m very pleased with the end result, and was happy to see people at the conference play with them. We kept people a bit in the dark about what to do with them at first, but they figured it out. One of the biggest compliments was someone who came up to me to show he had figured out what the cards were good for, obviously proud of his achievement.

Many thanks to Roger ter Heide and Game in the City for giving us the opportunity to make this thing for the conference. Also thanks to Karel Millenaar and Julius Huijnk of FourceLabs for their contributions to the design. And a shout out to the BUROPONY crew for the ace graphic design.

Addendum: the quotes

As a bonus here’s a list of the quotes we used on the cards:

1. “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” – Philip K. Dick
2. “Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.” – Albert Einstein
3. “Reality leaves a lot to the imagination.” – John Lennon
4. “I reject your reality and substitute my own!” – Jeffrey Byron as Paul Bradford in the 1984 film Ragewar. Made famous by Adam Savage of MythBusters.
5. “Imagination is the one weapon in the war against reality.” – Jules de Gaultier
6. “I’m not crazy about reality, but it’s still the only place to get a decent meal.” – Groucho Marx
7. “Reality… What a concept!” – Robin Williams
8. “Every time I close the door on reality it comes in through the windows.” – Jennifer Yane
9. “Reality isn’t what it used to be.” – Walter Truett Anderson

Our friends at BUROPONY have been hard at work on our brand design. We are very pleased with our Reynard-in-dazzle-camouflage logo. So pleased in fact, that we’ve had a batch high quality stickers printed! The box arrived today, and we’re eager to hand them out. So if you’d like a few, email us your mailing address.

Do send us photos of Hubbub stickers spotted in he wild! Better yet, post them to Flickr and tag them “whatsthehubbub”.

English readers please note: the interview is in Dutch. We’re sorry!

This is a video showing actual play of the urban game we designed for Change Your World; an event produced by Rotterdam European Youth Capital 2009 which took place on 26 & 27 september.

Original footage by CCCP. Music by Klaxons (Atlantis To Interzone) and The Prodigy (Omen). Thumbnail photo by Alper Çuğun.

A full project write-up is also available.

If you’re attending Game in the City this thursday and friday, keep an eye out for a little toy we’ll be handing out to all attendants. The event organization commissioned us to design something for a light-weight playful experience.¹ We came up with a set of small collectible paper cards with a twist. Hopefully it’ll persuade you into a bit of play, without getting in the way of all the other important stuff you’ll need to do (like, you know, talk to people and soak up all the good sessions on offer.) So it’s part game design experiment (agents of Hubbub will be present to observe), part calling-card (there’s a bit you can keep in case you’d like to get in touch with us) and we’re excited about releasing it into the wild.²

You might feel inclined to take photos of this little paper toy. If you do, post it to Flickr and use the conference tag “gitc2009”. (And while you’re at it, be sure to use ours too. That’s “whatsthehubbub”.)

We hope to see you in Amersfoort and would be delighted to hear your thoughts on the toy!

1. Thank you to Roger ter Heide for giving us the opportunity.
2. Stay tuned for a future post that will look at the process behind this project.

Below is a transcript of the talk (translated from Dutch) along with most of the slides. In short, it is an introduction of the Hubbub ‘philosophy’ and an explanation of how this relates to media literacy. I hope you find it of interest.

Hello, my name is Kars Alfrink. I am the founder of Hubbub, a new design studio. We create physical, social games for public space. We create games that take on meaningful problems, such as social issues.

By physical we mean that our games get you moving. We believe our cognition is deeply connected to the sensory perception of physical reality. We think it is valuable to reconnect people to the places they inhabit.

By social we mean that social dynamics, the way people interact with each other, are a material we work with. By definition, the meaning of games is socially constructed. We consciously design for this.

One example of our work is an urban game we created for Your World, in which players claimed territory in the centre of Rotterdam. They did this by planting flags on crossroads. Subsequently, they campaigned for their “movement” at these spots.

We think games are interesting because they are complex systems that run on people.¹ For us, technology is a means, not a goal. Our medium is human behavior.² With games we hope to increase the systems literacy of people.

Systems literacy and media wisdom are closely related to each other. The overlapping media landscape is a complex adaptive system. People shouldn’t passively inhabit it, but should be its active shapers.

Lost is a television show about a group of people who after a plane crash are marooned on a mysterious tropical island. It is famous (or infamous) for its complex story lines as well as for the complex web of media that has emerged around the show.

This is a diagram by Dan Hill that show the events occurring from the release of one Lost episode in the US to the release of that same episode in the UK. Official and unofficial media, blogs, wikis, forums, spoof websites and even a book on Amazon are platforms for Lost’s sprawling story.³

An episode of Lost illustrates on a small scale what I mean when I say that the overlapping media landscape has become a complex adaptive system. Although the behavior of the parts might be predictable to some extent, as a whole it certainly isn’t. These systems shape our behavior wether we’re aware of it or not. In turn, we shape these systems, ad infinitum.

Biologists call this process coevolution; when two species are dependent on each other for survival. Certain species of hummingbird for instance have bills that are shaped to fit the flowers they feed from, and pollinate as a result too.

How do we educate people about the coevolutionary process that exists between them and the media they use? How do we make them aware of the fact that they can, in their own small way, change it? We think you can do this by letting them explore the limits and possibilities of complex systems within a safe context. Or to put it simply: by letting them play.

Let’s look at a few examples: Budget Ball is a game created by Area/Code, commissioned by the US government. It helps players to understand the effects of growing debt. In this way, one of the fundamental elements of the global credit crisis is made comprehensible.

This shows the unimportance of technology (Budget Ball is a physical sport). It also beautifully illustrates the fact that the actions players perform in a game can be completely unrelated to the message the game is supposed to convey. (There is no thematic relationship between a ball game and the credit crisis, right?)

Mitch Resnick’s StarLogo is a tool with which children can build and simulate complex systems. For example, how traffic jams emerge. It’s kind of like Sim City, but with the hood open.

StarLogo utilizes praxis, experimental learning, or as I like to call it: thinking by doing. We feel that the separation between practical skills and theoretical knowledge is an artificial one. To deal with complex systems, reflection in action is required.

Smokescreen is a game by Six to Start for Channel 4. The goal is to teach youth about the importance of online privacy and security. On the world wide web they solve puzzles. Their progress is rewarded with bits of story.

The topic of Smokescreen is a sensitive one. But because this is a game, players can experiment within a safe context and gain insight into the effects their actions may have.

Our brains are excellent pattern matching machines. They adjust to new patterns and when confronted with chaos, they start looking for order. Systems are nothing but patterns that unfold over time.⁴

To explain, take Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. For its time, this piece was unconventional to say the least. As a result, its initial reception was poor. People hated it. Only later, when their brains had adjusted to the music’s new patterns, was the piece properly valued.

In the same manner I hope that with physical, social games, we can make people more capable of ‘reading’ complex systems, and ‘writing’ them. Thank you.

1. This is an expression I’ve heard Kevin Slavin of Area/Code use, and I think it is spot on.
2. This is an assertion Robert Fabricant of Frog Design made in his presentation at the IxDA’s Interaction ‘09 conference.
3. While preparing this talk, I was introduced to this wonderful diagram by Matt Jones through his presentation at Design by Fire ‘09.
4. The image is by Richard Gregory and is titled Dalmatian Dog. During the preparation of this talk I was introduced to this example and the next one thanks to James Box and Cenydd Bowles’ presentation at Design by Fire ‘09.