I was honoured to talk at Playful last Friday, a brilliant conference in London run by Mudlurk. The theme this year was 'Playing With Form', and I talked about "putting things in things", and how the language and concepts we've been brought up with in various fields don't necessarily work with 'internet boxes', as it were.
My slides are here, but more than ever I probably need to add narration, which I shall endeavour to do this week.
It was a great day, but don't just take my word for it - Frankie used some Artefact Cards to take sketchnotes from the whole day too, (below is an example), and Simon, Anjali and Heather have also been writing up their thoughst afterwards.
I'd also worked with Greg from Mudlark to design a light wee game for going aropund the conference, or indeed other conference and gathering spaces, called Seven Cubic Feet.
We have a few left too, which may make it into the site here at some stage if anyone feels they missed out.
Now, you may be wondering what that is around the deck... well, it's the sleeve we've had, ahem, up our sleeve to go around the new box.
Artefact fan Andrew pointed out that the new boxes were nice, but not ideal for him. He tended to carry the packs around individually in his bag, and they'd end up falling out moreoften than not. Which, admittedly, isn't ideal.
User feedback like this is always ideal; precise use cases that you can go and test for yourself, and think of workarounds. We've been playing around with the 'sleeve', like a matchbox skin to slide over the top of boxes as you carry them around.
It actually turns out to solve some other problems as well. Firstly, we'd lost the place for branding we had with our old boxes - on the old box, we had a clean, stickered space on the front, like this one we did for The Do Lectures this year (picture by Jonathan Cherry):
Now, we've set up the sleeves so they can be printed digitally down at Keith's in Axminster, so we can do pretty short run branded kits again, which is great (just email me for now if you're interested in doing branded packs like this, I'm be setting up a new FAQ shortly about it, but until then will just answer any queries).
The other great thing about the sleeve is that we've made sure the notch is the same level off the ground so you can make a double-leg stand for the cards, if you wish:
All in all, the sleeve is looking like a total winner, so we're going to start including them on future packs from this week onwards.
(If you've already bought a box recently with the new pack style, but would like some sleeves for them, just give me a shout and we'll sort you out with some).