Client game
One of the difficulties when working with student projects for ‘external’ clients/partners is to make clients understand the dynamics of a student project. For this we designed a board game that is to be played with two representatives from the client and two teachers. The goal of the game is to gain insight in tbe pros and the cons of a student project. We designed a prototype that we will playtested and developed more in the upcoming months.

Student game
The other tools we worked on were for the execution of a multidisciplinary student project. Challenges to tackle: How do you create good student teams, with 300-500 students who may not know each other? How do you engage the students during the project and make their progre ss visible? etc. Based on the approach from La Salle we developed rules and tools to be used and tested in Denmark next year.

All participants of the project cooked and ate together, enjoying the local specialties and played lots of games to be inspired. Games we liked were Space Team, tag, Jungle Speed, Fingle and Standoff. They gave our creativity a boost!

The team: Mikkel Lodahl  (twitter: @thelohdal) and Anders Van Pedersen (twitter @AndersVP) from Videndjurs Denmark, Emiliano Labrador (Twitter @emil_lab) and Oscar Garcia Pañella (twitter @kokopus_dark) from La Salle Univerity  and Evelyn Grooten (twitter @evelyng), Daniëlle Krabshuis and Corné van Delft (twitter @cornevandelft) from HKU University of the Arts Utrecht

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Deze commissie was erg enthousiast! Ze noemden ons ‘top of the bill’:

De commissie die het onderzoek en de manier waarop onderzoek en onderwijs vervlochten zijn op KMT onder de loep heeft genomen is lovend. Zij vinden het onderzoek en de samenwerking tussen onderwijs en onderzoek op KMT ‘top of the bill’ en ‘het beste op dit gebied in Nederland’. De commissie was verbluft over de hoeveelheid projecten die KMT uitvoert en de hoeveelheid samenwerkingen waarin zij betrokken is. Ook de kwaliteit van het werk werd geprezen. Min-puntje vond men de relatieve onbekendheid van al dit mooie werk in Nederland…. Daar zijn we al wel mee bezig maar dat moet dus nog beter.

Dat is natuurlijk reden voor taart!

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Wat startte met een tweedaags Development Camp, mondde donderdag 18 april uit in een beoordeling van een jury van de Hogeschool voor Kunsten Utrecht (HKU). De game Olga werd getest door docenten van de HKU. They were bloody impressed!

Jakob Boeve, Jan van Nimwegen en Jos Sauren gingen donderdag met ‘hun’ serious game Olga naar de HKU. Docenten daar wilden ervaren wat Olga als game voorstelde. De handen jeukten van de aanwezige docenten. Ze speelden de game en tijdens het spelen slaakten ze kreten als: “Ik wil nog een keer spelen! Kan dat?”, “I am bloody impressed” en “Dit had ik niet verwacht, dat jullie al zover zouden zijn!”.

Mooie woorden over de game. Ook prachtige woorden over het leereffect waarover Jan en Jakob vertelden aan de HKU: Javaprincipes zijn duidelijker geworden. Ook heb ik meer zelfvertrouwen gekregen en ik durf nu meer zelf te doen. Een tip was er ook van de docenten: “Geef geen tekstuele uitleg over de game. Een game ervaar je, dus ook hoe je een game speelt!” Er is dus nog werk te doen. Aandacht heeft nu de tweede game ‘Sticky’. Die heeft als thema veilig omgaan met data en hoe je als speler data op je USB-stick zet.

Meer informatie over dit project is te lezen op de projectpagina Java

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The Road To Happiness is an awareness campaign and computer game developed for Plan Nederland by the Utrecht School of the Arts (HKU). It was launched by MTV on March 8th 2013.

A multidisciplinary team of ten HKU students from the schools of Games & Interaction, Media, and Art & Economics, were challenged to create a campaign from the perspective of two different cultures, in order to immerse Dutch youth with a lower educational level in the difficult circumstances faced by young Ghanaian women looking for work.

Listening to the experiences, wishes and ideas of the young women provided valuable insight to the students.  Tumu, Northern Ghana.

Several weeks of ethnographic research, interviews and small workshops on location resulted in four thoughtful video portraits of women travelling from the north of Ghana to the southern city of Accra to pursue their dream of finding happiness and prosperity.

To illustrate the difficult situation of the young women, working hard for little money, the students also designed and developed an online multiplayer game, to be played by both girls and boys. The game lets the player experience the struggle of earning a living by selling products on a competitive market place during the day, and the challenge of finding a safe place to survive during the night.

The universal wish for happiness connects the two cultures and acts as a starting point for awareness.

HKU students tested their design with young students at Via Nova College, Utrecht.

The Road to Happiness is part of WeCreate, a four-year program of Plan Nederland, where young designers who currently study at the HKU, design for the challenges of gender inequality.

This year the campaign focused on Ghana. In the coming two years HKU and Plan will continue collaborating together on WeCreate in Indonesia. This is a great challenge and opportunity for HKU students and the research groups Creative Design for Development and Games and Interaction Design Research to co-create with a variety of cultures.

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The Playing with Pigs project is featured in Liat Clark’s Wired article “A pig of a problem: designing human-animal interspecies games”.

Playing with pigs or orangutans via an iPad might sound like a novelty, but could this kind of digitally mediated interspecies communication change our view of the animal kingdom, and our treatment of it?

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