Two conferences this week.

On Monday, Sam from Pan and I spoke at TwilioCon Europe about Hello Lamp Post. In a brief ten-minute session on the “Inspire” track, we outlined the project and talked a little about the process of designing conversational interactions, and how to use the affordances of the city in the most appropriate manner. We also got to share some of the outcomes of the project – primarily statistical, but still nice to show people the reach of such work, and also the repeat-visitors we managed to generate. It seemed to go down well with the audience.

Friday was Playful, which served in part as a day out with the tribe, and in part a place to park my brain and let it have new thoughts. My notes from the day are as much notes to myself about ideas I’ve had as notes on the talk. As ever, I particularly enjoyed the talks that focused on craft – a place between exploring, playing, expertise, and knuckling down and doing the hard work. I had a good time, and was pleased with where my thoughts went by the end of the day – some nice new ideas, some confirmation of my own thoughts, and some useful challenges to my own processes.

On Thursday, I saw Kars for lunch. We catch up about every three months, just to talk about where our thoughts and processes are, what the shape of work for both of us looks like. And of course, we inevitably talk about interaction and game design. It was a great lunch with a good friend, but also valuable to share knowledge with another practitioner – if only to get an external perspective on your own work, to remind you that things aren’t necessarily as they seem inside the bubble. That’s fed well into what I’m loosely describing as Yearnotes, and I’ll hopefully write that up soon.

The rest of the week was, as a result, fairly scattered. Some more tidying up of Housedon, some small pieces of writing, some sketching and poking. Nothing vast, but not all weeks can be; sometimes, you just keep poking things forward.