I do a lot of betatesting of my #games and new tools. The process is creative, but I have had to learn to separate myself from the products so that I can receive #feedback without becoming defensive. This is harder than it sounds – when...
As a conference designer, I tend to avoid conferences that I am not involved in. I find that the traditional model of talking heads is boring, and even when there is an amazing speaker, there is no call to action or meaningful processes for participants...
As a digital nomad I can work anywhere, and I have. I remember waking up early in Colorado to get a few hours on the computer before hitting the ski slopes or being stymied by limited connectivity in Asia. I have checked in from beaches...
In March, I wrote a blog on games vs. gamifcation. It was supposed to be the beginning of regularly sharing my learnings from the last five years of building my own business. A few days after posting it, I started another blog on failure. It...
For a while, people were trying to "gamify everything". Or maybe there has been a push to "-ify” our lives. We “Shopify" our online stores and "Googlefy” our office spaces. We think that by making nouns into verbs we are simplifying our lives. The problem...
Sometimes you know you are in the right place at the right time. TechChill 2018 was the right place and just the right time. After moving to Europe and trying to find a footing, TechChill was where I needed to be. Suddenly I realized that the...
In May of 2017, Can I Help? was launched and within the first six weeks, over 1000 people had played it. My reward is watching the conversations that people have while they play my games; the moments where people are listening and sharing, the insights people game,...
In July 2017, I took the train down to Montreal to experience StartUpFest and launch a new game - REStrukt: Serendipity. The central theme of StartUpFest 2017 was that success can be constructed and so the game was designed to show early-stage start-ups that they...
From March 2016 through till March 2017 I had the honour to work on a very important project with Public Safety Canada - redesigning, and then teaching, a new process to support Canadian Indigenous communities in crisis. The project, for me, culminated in a giant...
In 2016 JP and I put in an application for a WaveMakers grant! Before we knew what we were going to do, why this was an important topic, or how to make the complexity of oceans into a simple game, we had a name, Shrimps...