Category Archives: Speakers

Speaker Announcement: materials, data, food, algorithms and mischief.

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Hi, halló, wilkommen, hej hej, olá etc

Thanks for joining us on this Very Special Episode. In this episode, Blossom will discover the – no sorry, wrong post. In this Very Special Blog Post, readers will discover a bunch of people who are going to talk at Playful 2013, some idea about what they’re going to talk about and some really important life lessons like Stay In School and Be Yourself.

We are properly excited about everyone that’s coming along so far, and ready to have our minds ripped wide open by the bloody marvellous things they have to say, so let’s get to it.

INTRODUCING:

Jane ní Dhulchaointigh
Jane is an inventor. Not a mad one, not an evil one, just a straight up, classic inventor. She is responsible for creating Sugru – the wonderful rubbery fix-anything material – and, as CEO, has spent the last eight or so years helping people ‘hack things better’.

My bathroom floor would be a much wetter place if it weren’t for Jane, so I’m very pleased to have her talk this year.

Dan Catt
You know Dan, right? Nice guy, big beard. Really big beard. Properly massive beard, down to here? Well, there’s also a brilliant brain behind those long flowing face-locks, one that juggles creative programming with art and stuff that pays the bills – previously for people like Flickr and the Guardian.

He’s going to be talking about trying to make the Most Perfect Snakes & Ladders Board Ever™, which involves lots of things like algorithms, time, and generating thousands and thousands of gameboards.

Ben Reade
Ben is what happens when parents don’t tell you to stop playing with your food. Following roles in various restaurants – including River Cottage in Devon, and as Head Chef of Iglu in Edinburgh – he ended up doing a Bachelor’s thesis on ‘Flavour Exploration and Biotechnology in New Nordic Cuisine’.

Now, as Head of Culinary Research & Development at Nordic Food Lab in Copenhagen, Ben’s whole life is about what can happen when you really muck about with food. He will be talking about his experiences and exploring the idea of play as vital to research.

Dani Lurie
Dani wears a couple of hats as Associate Editor of Oh, Comely magazine (an absolutely beautiful thing you should pick up if you get chance) and Head of Creative at Adeline Media. Her main bent, though, is fun. At Oh, Comely, Dani has been practising mischief as a way to create real user engagement and she will be talking about creative, positive mischief.

Stefanie Posavec
Well, what do you say? Stefanie’s been making some of the most beautiful graphics – across book covers, albums, apps and posters – over the past few years. More impressively, she uses data as a material in the creation of these works. She will be talking about her process, inspiration and whatever she wants because she’s ace.

John V Wilshire
John has a strong background in marketing and communications. Before founding Smithery, he managed accounts for global brands at Phd. These days, he plays about with the bits between physical and digital, consulting for large agencies to help them think smarter about how digital campaigns work in the physical world. He also doodles on a lot of Artefact cards. A lot.

He will be using his soothing Scottish brogue to talk about putting things in things and having form in form.

AND FINALLY.

Playful this year will be hosted by one of our favourite people, the Boss of Tate Kids and other not-so-kids, Sharna Jackson.

Sharna is going to keep everyone in line, to time and happy, whilst doing various magic tricks, juggling kittens and reciting poetry about her boat. She hasn’t planned to do any of that, but she is bloody going to have to now.

THAT’S THAT FOR NOW.

There are less than ONE HUNDRED tickets left, so just ask yourself “is this something I can really bear to miss?“. Pretty sure the answer is NO, so sort yourself out and lean back, satisfied.

More announcements as they come along, so follow us on twitter.

Bye for now.

One week to go: Running Order & things to know

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Ah.  A week to go. The to-do list that sits on my shoulder is slowly being ticked off, meaning that Playful 2012 is getting more and more real. That’s exciting, but always a tiny bit terrifying. For me, hopefully not for you.

Here’s a bunch of stuff to know for Next Friday:

LINEUP & SCHEDULE.

 

 

There’s a good amount of you and Conway Hall’s registration area is quite small, so don’t leave it until 09:58 to sign in. Help us all out and get in a bit earlier. There’s coffee and that to soften the blow.

09am+
Registration

9:50
Josie Long — Introduction & welcome

10 — 11
Mark Sorrell, Hide & Seek — Computer Games (Not Video Games)
Anab Jain, Superflux  — Faerie Stories for the 21st Century
Hannah Donovan, This Is My Jam — Digital Craft

Coffee break

11:30 — 12.30
Einar Sneve Martinussen, VOY/ AHO — Means of Production
Siobhan Reddy, Media Molecule — Learnings from New Ideas
Simon Cutts, Coracle — Playing with form

12:30 — 1:40
Lunch

1:40 — 2:40
Bennett Foddy — No Pain, No Game: Confusion & Frustration in game design
Aron, Rob, Oli (TechsQuad) — v.01: sound, animation, interaction, narrative and joysticks
Holly Gramazio, Hide & Seek — Clapping Games

Tea break

3:10 — 4:10
Mint Foundry & Alice Taylor, Makie — Toys With Purpose
Tom Ewing, Brainjuicer — The Thinking Behind Decisions
Annette Mees & Ian Williamson, Coney — Making A Talk

This starts off firm and gets looser as the day goes on. We’ll do our best to keep time in order and get to the pub for half four, but you know what these things can be like — everything is subject to change.

SOME THINGS PEOPLE ASK

 

 

How do I get there?
Conway Hall is at 25, Red Lion Square, London, WC1R 4RL. The nearest tube is Holborn, two minutes away.

Do I need to bring anything?
You were sent a PDF ticket when you bought one, have that to hand (as print out or on your phone) and it’ll be fine.  Multiple bookings on the same order get sorted out smoothly, so don’t fret.

You can bring your favourite mug for maximum refreshment satisfaction, otherwise, a pen, a pad and your brain are all you need bring.

I actually can’t make it any more. Can someone use my ticket?
That’s a bit of a bummer. You can pass it on to a friend, or let us know via email or twitter and we’ll try to hook you up with someone who can.

What’s the connectivity/wifi like?
It’s getting better, but still pretty sketchy. All that stuff’s a bit distracting if you’re trying to listen to people anyway.

Do you have an Official Hashtag of the Playful Conference 2012™?
Yes, we do. We endorse the use of #playful12 to aggregate your opinions, links and insights garnered from the day across the key social network platforms.

 

That’s it for now. See you next week, all cheery and forgiving.

Final speakers and OH GOD IT’S ONLY TWO WEEKS AWAY

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Here we are, then.

Two weeks to go. Massively sold out. A full speaker list of brilliant people. Badges somewhere on the way to our studio. A pub with money behind the bar (thanks, Sheridans). A bunch of nice volunteers signed up to help everyone have a good day.

We just need to find somewhere to lay our heads and decide which biscuits to spend Ogilvy’s dime on this year. Currently thinking about a mixture of under-rated classics, a sturdy old reliable and maybe one or two lavish ones from the new school. TBC.

Let’s get to know our latest additions that round out the day.

SIMON CUTTS.

Simon is an artist, poet and all-round fascinating man who has been working in creative publishing since the ’60s. I recently saw a lot of his work, and works published by him under the Coracle banner, at a recent exhibition at Site Gallery (also, our new home). I was enthralled by his playful deconstruction of what a book is, and the processes that created new interpretations of the form. Simon will be talking about playing with form, which will be fantastic and illuminating.

SIOBHAN REDDY.

Siobhan is the studio director for MediaMolecule, creators of two of the finest, most creative games ever made — LittleBigPlanet and LittleBigPlanet2. You may have noticed that MM recently announced  Tearaway, a brand new game that pushes the PSVita to its absolute edges and makes handheld gaming creative, essential and bloody mindblowing again. Siobhan will be telling us a bit about Tearaway, but also the creative processes that go into making MediaMolecule amazing.

TOM EWING.

A few years ago, we did a bad thing. We let the word gamification become a thing that people said. It was said, and it is now said A Lot. It’s short-hand for lazy tossers to try and get people to do things with the promise of a badge at the end of it. It’s the ugly sister of behavioural economics.

So, we’ve invited Tom Ewing from brilliant market research agency, Brainjuicer, to come and talk about Actual Decision Making. From coaxing people to confess cleaning shame with a boardgame, through surveys designed to stress you out, to playing Chinese whispers about new laundry products, Tom will showcase some of Brainjuicer’s game experiments, and put them in the wider context of human decision making and what games do to it.

ALICE TAYLOR & MINT FOUNDRY.

Our friends at Mint Digital have run a project for the last couple of years giving recent graduates an opportunity to spend three months working on a creative brief to make a real thing. Last year’s intake created Olly — the web connected smelly robot. This year, the brief has been to Make A Toy With Purpose. To make it even more appealing, they’re making a sourdough-based toy. Seriously. So, we’re getting them up on stage to talk about the process and things that they’ve learnt.

We’ve also pulled in the wonderful Alice Taylor from Makie Labs to act as the Letterman to their collective Ollie Reed. Alice is currently doing exceptional things in the toy-space by helping people design their own 3D-printed dolls that are then actually made in the UK. Marvellous.

Tiny bit exciting, eh?

We are totally sold out, but there will be a late flurry of “oh-I-double-booked-myself-anyone-want-my-ticket?” activity, so follow us on Twitter as we will post any ticket opportunities up there.

 

A splashy speakers update.

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Hello, there.

It’s been a lovely couple of weeks, with everyone celebrating all the sports and batshit crazy competitions (Omnium! Tron Fencing! Modern Pentathlon!) of an amazing Olympic games. We’re all sad to see it leave, back to arguing about hobnobs and whether Tom Hardy was doing a Victor Meldrew impression in T’Dark Knight Rises.

To keep our high of good-feeling going, we are excited to fanfare the entrance of a few new speakers waving tiny flags and snapping audience photos on a disposable Kodak camera:

BENNETT FODDY
Bennett is as close as you can get to the Two Face of indie games. By day, he is Senior Research Fellow and Deputy Director at Oxford University (Ethics of the New Biosciences, since you ask); by night, he is the creator of brilliantly infuriating conceptual games such as QWOP, GIRP and new unicorn fun – CLOP. Games that make you question your ability to actually do anything at all, but laugh all the way through it. Bennett will be talking about how confusion and frustration are core parts of videogame design.

HOLLY GRAMAZIO
 Holly designs games. Big games in big spaces, like parks and the city. Stuff that makes you run around and play daft. She will be talking about the long tradition of clapping games — from high-fives to playgrounds and even snazzy tech-enabled ones. You may even learn how to play one, too.

ANAB JAIN
 Anab Jain is founder and director of Superflux, a proper whizzing, forward-facing design practice. Anab will be bringing her thoughts from the interaction end of playfulness to the day, and we look forward to finding out exactly what.

TechsQUAD
Rob, Aron and Oli are a collection of technicians with mixed  backgrounds in photography, set design, sound engineering, projection and tea drinking. Based inside Derby’s QUAD Art & Film Centre they will be performing a spiel about ”v.01″ – a combination of sound, animation, interaction, narrative and joysticks.

We are still cajoling and jostling  some more gems, whom we hope to be able to announce fairly soon too. There’s just a handful of tickets left, so it’s probably worth you putting your mouse on this URL and fulfilling your wishes.

The Pickle That Holds It All Together

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Afternoon all and congratulations to every single one of you.

This is a small post to introduce some BIG NEWS that we are pretty excited about, and one or two of you may be bit excited about it too.

Our compere for Playful 2012 will be the most excellent, mirthful and giddy JOSIE LONG.

You may recognise Josie from off of the telly in such things as Charlie Brooker’s You Have Been Watching, and Never Mind The Buzzcocks, or heard her on the wireless on Radio 1, Resonance FM or Absolute Radio. Maybe you’ve even seen her on stage doing what’s she’s best at: telling jokes and making lols appear.

The compere’s job is one of the most under-rated and hard to do. A mixture of good humour, getting names correct and gently hauling people off stage when they’re yammering on about something or other 5 minutes too long — and we think we’ve come up trumps with such an excellent host.

Give Josie a warm welcome, and see you again soon.

2012, then.

dolphin

We have decided to do it again.

We like you all so much and it’s great fun. We’ll be at the same spot, on the same stage, with the same Very Good For Your Posture chairs, and we’ll be out at the same time, so that the same tango dancers can exercise their joints. If we’re lucky, us Mudlarkers may get to have our morning bacon butties before they go cold.

Playful 2012 will be different though. There will be new faces and new voices, new thoughts and new whims. We’ve put the future to bed, and we’re getting on with the now and the nearly now. There will be genius imparted from good folks, smiles laid upon the faces of all who come, and maybe – just maybe – one or two REALLY good words that lodge in your brain and tickle you into creating something completely brilliant.

We are excited to be back, full of piss and vinegar, ready to put on the best show yet.

To get you in the mood for BUYING SOME OF THE TICKETS WE HAVE FOR SALE, let us introduce you to the first batch of our most excellent speakers:

Hello there, Hannah Donovan.

Han is roundly welcomed by all at Playful, as she is part of the team behind one our favourite things of the past six months: This Is My Jam. Without giving too much away, and because it’s only April, Han may talk about digital craft, but she may not. It doesn’t really matter, because it will be great.

Oh, hi, Einar Sneve Martinussen.

We are delighted to be bringing Einar over from Oslo and the excellent design studio Voy and Oslo School of Architecture and Design. Einar, and Jørn, make lovely things with their hands, actual machinery and consumer electronics. Things like the beautiful Ugle or the drone-wonderful Wind Speaker. A good chance of tales from the forefront of new craft.

Hallo, Annette Mees.

Annette is no stranger to the stage, being co-director of the marvellous experimental theatre bunch at Coney. At Coney, Annette mucks about in a constructive way, creating interactive experiences for theatre-goers and laptop-lovers alike. We are very much looking forward to her doing whatever it is she chooses to do with twenty minutes, a stage and a roomful of open minds.

Finally, for now: Good Afternoon, Mark Sorrell.

Sorrell is that rarest of things: a very tall man. He is VERY tall. And loud. VERY loud. He is hard to ignore, so we decided to put him on stage to have a proper listen to the things he says in his new role as Games Guy at Somethin’ Else. We’re not certain what he’ll be talking about just yet, but if it’s anything like this, then we’ll be properly made up.

That’s it for now, more soon. Get real time updates on the live internet for all the happenings as they’re going on. Use the hashtag of #playful12 (if you’re into that sort of thing) and tell Lanyrd that you’re attending Playful this year.

See you soon.

TL; DR: great speakers, buy tickets, get excited!

Speaker additions, a subtraction and running order.

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As the sun finally sets on an Indian Summer and the cold wind starts to whisper on our whiskers, Playful is only a couple of weeks away.  Now is a good time to warm you with the finalised line-up for this years talking and pointing extravaganza.

Our newest and last additions to an already wonderful line-up are Louise Downe, Emil Ovemar and Pat Cadigan. Some more about them, then:

Louise Downe

Louise Downe is a service designer at Seren, previously at the Tate where she made some pretty playful things including games and interactive installations. From her experiences making mobile and interactive things, she’ll be looking at the role lies and lying have in UX design.

Emil Ovemar

Emil is co-founder and producer at Toca Boca. Coming from an old media world, Emil now makes the finest interactive kids toys going, based on pretending and playful interactions. Emil will be talking about developing Toca Boca and a new approach to Making Things.

Pat Cadigan

Pat Cadigan doesn’t need much of an introduction. She is the ‘Queen of Cyberpunk’, sci-fi author and a leading high-scorer in Chromaroma. We think Pat will be talking about distributed identity, but we’ll wait and see.

Get down to Conway Hall for 9:30ish, bring your favourite mug and then sit back for a line-up that goes a bit like this:

9:50 Toby Barnes — Hello
10:00 Al Robertson — Sci fi as a genre of play
10:20 Matt Sheret — Time Lords, frothing and Dungeon Master
10:40 Georgina Voss — Consent and negotiation in playful and interactive events
11:00 LAYER ILLUSTRATION
11:10 Break
11:30 Sami Niëmela — Cyborgs & superpowers
11:50 Louise Downe — Lies in UX design
12:10 Paul Rissen — MMORPG & linked data
12:30 Brendan Dawes — Playing properly: Interactive design and physical product.
12:50 LAYER ILLUSTRATION
13:00 Lunch
14:00 Marcus Brown — Stories & the middle-age future
14:20 Pat Cadigan — Identity
14:40 Emil Overmar — Designing toys
15:00 LAYER ILLUSTRATION FINAL
15:20 Break
15:40 Richard LeMarchand
15:50 Chris O’Shea — The near future of play on screens and portable devices
16:10 Mills™ Wonka & Neil “Paris Hair” McFarland — Whale Trail™ & game design
16:30 WRAP UP & POINT TO PUB

Sadly, but completely understandably, Anna Pickard will be over in Vancouver launching a game, so won’t be able to take the stage this year.

Scribbling Tennis.

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We’re big fans of Coudal’s Layer Tennis in the Playful Mill. We thought we’d pay them a tribute this year, in our own special, lo-fi way. The Playful Scribbling Tennis live draw-off will be a doodle to the death, using a few pens, some acetate paper and a true historical artefact — the Overhead Projector of Doom.

We’re dead excited to pit four of our favourite illustrators against each other in this inky battle: Mr Bingo, Gemma Correll, Ian Stevenson and Playful veteran Rex Crowle.

Each illustrator will have four chances to out-fox their opponent with the might of their pens, before victory is decided by the crowd barking their approvals. One of these fine combatants will walk away with the smug sense of victory (possibly a limited value prize), whilst the vanquished scribblers will slink off into that cold night.

Commentary for these battles will come from everybody’s favourite Terrett, Ben.

More speakers for the fire.

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Completing another round of speaker acquisitions, we are pretty stoked to announce that the following excellence will be performing a talk at Playful this year:

Richard Lemarchand.

Richard is a Lead Game Designer at Naughty Dog over in sun-drenched California. He is currently up all night and wired all day working on one of the most eagerly-awaited console games of the year — Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception. Richard is particularly interested in storytelling action games and how narrative, aesthetics and gameplay can keep a player’s attention, whilst making them feel in control. We’re not sure what he’ll be talking about yet, but it will be awesome and you’ll just have to trust us.

Mills™ – CHIEF WONKA™.

Mills™ is King of Succailure™ and CHIEF WONKA™ of the rather brilliant digital design studio ustwo™. Ustwo are responsible for all sorts of mobile app goodies including the .™ series of games, Mouth Off,  Nursery Rhyme Story Time, Granimator and shedloads more. Mills™ will be talking about making Whale Trail™ – a wonderfully designed, playable and heart warming iOS game – from the ground-up. ’Ground-up’ being the operative phrase because, in theory, ustwo™ have never actually made a game before.

Anna Pickard.

Anna is a writer. Anna may also be seen as a full-time LARPer: she pretends to be other things for a living. Her current main roles are as the voice of Bertrum Thumbcat on twitter – star of Cravendale’s “cat with thumbs” – and objects like rocks and trees and peat bogs in the MMORPG Glitch. Anna will be talking about what it’s like to write as these playful characters, but also the ways in which people are so happy to engage with things they know aren’t real.

Paul Rissen.

Paul works at the BBC as an Information Architect. This is as a result of a life-long obsession with a time-travelling Doctor and his various companions. Paul’s current work focusses around the Semantic Web, and particularly the development of the BBC’s Mythology Engine. During his talk at Playful, Paul will be applying his thinking about the Semantic Web and linked data to the world of games, in particular Mario, MMORPGs and making it all a bit more fun.

We are down to the final pool of tickets, so don’t be sad on October 21st, get one.

Introducing… (part 2)

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Time to announce some more splendid speakers for this year’s event. They’re all solid gold eggs, so give them a warm welcome:

Brendan Dawes.

You know Brendan Dawes, he’s the man with opinions, a good shirt and excellent stationery.  He also happens to be a bloody marvellous designer, both in digital form as ECD at magneticNorth and of real physical things as co-founder of Beep Industries. Brendan’s been making things since forever, from the ZX81 in the ’80s, through the Flash heyday and now pushing the edges of processing and HTML5. His work has been shown as far and wide as MOMA and the internet, and we’re delighted to present him at Conway Hall.

Brendan is bringing his wonderful take on ‘playing properly’, from romantic electronics to useful 3D printed objects.

Al Robertson.

Al is a sci-fi, fantasy and horror writer whose stories have been published alongside Bruce Sterling and Ray Bradbury. Right now, he’s busy completing his second novel. He also works in helping people like Sony and the British Council work out what stories to tell, and how to do it. He’ll be opening up his rather large brain to explore why and how Science Fiction is a genre built on play, how it allows us to bend the rules of reality, and somehow predict the future.

Sami Niemelä.

Sami is Creative Director at Nordkapp, a Finnish agency of designers, strategists and technologists. Sami wants to make the future happen. His vision for doing this is to make things that make the world a bit better, through smart design and new technologies. At Playful, Sami will be talking about cyborgs and superpowers, unintentionally dramatic surfaces and the objects we surround ourselves with.

Shaping up rather nicely, isn’t it?

There are still a handful of tickets left — grab one.