design and the black box
Designing for playful media and games presents a particular challenge – not for designers, but for the study of design. The most useful critical resources in this study are those that draw attention to process of the development of systems, and that render problematic any straightforward idea that there is a simple process from conception […] more…
Lightbug at The Rooms
The full prototype of the Lightbug swing was installed by Tine Bech as the centrepiece of the REACT exhibition The Rooms in Bristol 4th – 7th November. Below is the text I wrote for a flyer. Exploring the playground of the future with a digitally enhanced set of swings Lightbug is a […] more…
rooftops and birds
This was written for our Play Sandbox journal back in November, and I forgot to put a copy here. Tine and I are in Denmark to meet PlayAlive, a company that specialise in interactive technology for public and school playgrounds. They are based in Vejle, a little over two hours by train from Copenhagen. Before […] more…
global media mo(ve)ment
From induction session for MA Global Media Management at WSA… The videogame Sonic the Hedgehog was released in the United States and Europe in 1991. For around 10 years Sonic was the mascot for SEGA, the Japanese games company, and as such a serious competitor to Nintendo’s Mario. At the time he was hugely popular […] more…
gesture, technology and play
This is the website for a symposium organised by Helen W Kennedy, Patrick Crogan and myself at the Pervasive Media Studio in Bristol in 2010. Its ‘reading room’ has links to presentations and subsequent publications. The body has of course always been central to our playful engagements with games and games technologies. Yet, the embodied player […] more…Lightbug video
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on not re-inventing Centrifugal Bumble-Puppy
Outside, in the garden, it was playtime. Naked in the warm June sunshine, six or seven hundred little boys and girls were running with shrill yells overs the lawns, or playing ball games, or squatting silently in twos or threes among the flowering shrubs […] The air was drowsy with the murmur of bees and […] more…
DanceTag report
It took a while, but the report on the DanceTag project (written by myself and Zannah Doan) is available for download. It is, I think, an illuminating and honest account of experimental mobile play design for the cultural sector. The pdf is linked on the bottom right of the page. more…
