wow, what a great week that was.
MASSIVE thanks and WELL DONE to everybody involved for making it such a positive experience.
Julian, Ali and Nat kept smiling throughout, despite the uphill struggle to organise everything - workspace, socialising, schedule, conference and festival. and those damn wifi codes.
it was great to meet the whole team of hackers, and a particular joy to get to work with Ben and Kev on our little project.
i'm glad we kept the project simple, using already-existing tech and re-contextualising it for our benefit.
the PlayARK day yesterday at WMC was buzzing, despite the weather. our PlayDance booth had around 100 people using it, from the ages of 2 to 62, and it generated a smile on all faces. i didn't get chance to go up to TeamOne's installation but i heard really good feedback about it. TeamTwo's web app was looking good all day, and constantly updating - i'd like to spend more time with the archive and witness how the story changes with different users' input.
now we've got this little network, we should try to find ways to utilise it. Jorge has set up a dropbox folder to share memories of the week - which encouraged me to find a way of hacking simultaneous dropbox accounts on my mac. (thanks: Daniel Mann) and maybe we can connect in different ways.
hope to see you all soon,
john x
So another day finished. A really fantastically enjoyable creative day.
Day Three was about simplicity for me. We have our idea and now we are looking at way to simplify it. This has been from both a message point of view, what will people see, do, interact. And a practical level, in the time we have what can we do. And with the skill sets we have what is possible. (from a skillset point of view our technical knowledge is letting us down) we spent a lot of the day wrestling with IFTTT.com trying to get around the fact Vine doesn't have an open API - boo vine booo. We spend some of the day asking Andrew what an API was. And the rest of the day working out hacks to get around the thing we hoped Vine would let us do.
IFTTT.com is amazing.
So we have a plan, we have everything in place. Day Four, we make.
and
we have a logo. Which has made Julian laugh, laugh nervously.
I also have learnt some people can casually say "I'll get the jig-saw out tonight and sort that out" which is very similar to "That's just a simple bit of javascript to get that to loop"
Wednesday - the day in the middle of the week. and the day in the middle of our 3-day hackathon to make something for sharing at PlayArk2013. a day where creativity ran in waves of expanding ideas and complexity, then simplifying everything and starting again. regularly. setting up new websites and twitter accounts, and finding out that actually, sometimes the best technology can be a friendly face and a finger on a button.
we ended the day with Mr Hyde doing a birthday dance for me. in a large cardboard box.
what a great way to turn 44. creating creative stuff with creative people. with extensive use of post-it notes, TeamThree came up with a set of aims and objectives for our little project. its a good team - we have one person who tends to specialise in real people, one who is keen on real things and one who has faith in the virtual. its a great collaboration, and in no time at all we had come up with an idea and started running with it.
diversions came in the form of Rob telling us about his fascinating project called Conducttrrrr, or something, and offered it to us to play with, which was nice, and Ian telling us more than i imagined i'd ever need to know about L(A)RPing. which was also nice.
another hour of testing and developing and we had a very botched together prototype system.
at the end of the day, the three groups generously shared their ideas and gave feedback before disappearing off into the chilly Cardiff night.
after that, it seems as though Wednesday might prove to be the difficult second album.....
Day two:
So today was our first day trying to come up with an idea. It's been a fascinating day, if nothing else the challenge of quickly working with people you only met the day before. The task yesterday to create a game in a couple of hours certainly helped.
It has been interesting because it has made me think hard about my own work and what themes run through it and how that conflicts with other peoples way of approaching their work.
For me an element I always want to add is scale to a project, perhaps there it is something about working on the internet primarily - I want the world to be involved in everything!
Others in my group have a more intimate approach to their work which could have caused a tension. But intact it's been really good and I think will make the project strong in the end.
Now to make it!
Why not come along to our meeting on Wednesday evenings and see how you can get involved! Click here to view our calendar.
