Since going solo I haven’t really been content with working at home. It’s hard to explain, because working at home costs me 0 minutes of travel to my office and I have all the facilities I would need for a good day of work: a great sound system, an espresso machine, and a well stocked fridge.

Still something was missing: a hard separation of the life/work boundary —knowing myself, who am I kidding?— and seeing other people during the day. Thus started the quest for an office. Eelke also freelancing and just back from Berlin wanted to split an office. With two people as a start and open to add more people and co-workers as space allows, this could be pretty cool.

I have been calling various people on and off for the last two months in the Delft area. Arranging office space is a full time job by itself. There aren’t many opportunities around here and we are quite picky which makes for a difficult search.

We don’t need much it has to be cheap, near or in city center, with internet, electricity, and a lock on the door. We don’t need most of the traditional office amenities, like a receptionist, telephone lines, decent furnishing, in house catering, and parking spaces. This should be easy, right?

Bacinol

Bacinol, picture by Didier Brouwers

Interior of Bacinol, office of Vizi

There is an old industrial building at the skirts of city center called Bacinol which is a hotbed of young and creative entrepeneurs. Its lease is also very low which would have made it pretty awesome. Unfortunately and predictably it is completely full.

At the end of the year it is going to be demolished because of the construction of a railway tunnel. A part of the tenants are going to move to a building on the other end of city center at Hooikade 13. There is a severe lack of space in Delft for the kind of people that Bacinol caters for, tearing it down and replacing it by a building similar in size does not solve anything.

Last week there was a discussion at Bacinol about the need for creative spaces and the prospective offers there will be. There seems to be some stuff happening but most of it is bureaucratic and at least one year out, if not much more. One of the conclusions was that there is a great need for temporary (i.e. risky) lease constructions for the modern networked business that is happening now. Most of the people I talked to were too mired in bureaucracy or their own problems, that I’m not expecting any real solutions to come out of it.

Traditional corporate

We also hit some of the traditional avenues just to see what prices are about like. Anything via conventional realtors in the city center is priced ridiculously. It boggles the mind and tells you how much of a markup you are paying on your services just to be able to visit posh city center offices.

There are corporate agglomeration buildings on various locations outside of town. Besides being outside of town, these building offer all the traditional office amenities we don’t need, are quite expensive and are pretty much all full as well.

We hit one likely location in city center, which looked like it could have been interesting, but we were then snagged by an archaic Dutch arrangement for the lease of office space. Offices are usually let according to a 5+5 years contract. Which means you enter a contract to lease the space for five years and after those five years are over, you are allowed the option to lease it for another five years. Ejecting out of the contract befor the five years are over, is difficult. We could try to enter into a contract as a limited liability company and deflate that when we wanted out, but I think that is called bankrupcy fraud.
This is of course great for real estate owners who are practically guaranteed a solid lease for at least five years and it probably is also great for shopkeepers who want to stay in one place. It’s not so great for the here today gone tomorrow creative internet business we are in.

Alternatives

One of the alternatives we have not fully explored yet is to take office in an anti-squat building. This seems ideal from a space and cost perspective. We do not really need the long term security. Many people say an offer ‘is only valid until the end of the year’ which is plenty long as far as I’m concerned. I’m willing to take office somewhere for as short as six weeks.

We had such a brief lease the week before last when we spent two days Pascalle her old room which Eelke had furnished as a temporary office:

For just two days it still had the vibe of an office, a goto place for work related stuff and an affirmation of the reasons we are looking for an office.

The guy who lets out Bacinol has several other offices around town, where he caters to young starting technology companies. In fact he is just about the only person in Delft who does. I called him again an he’d just got an empty space of 18m2 at the end of the van Leeuwenhoeksingel (bordering the Zuidwal). This week I took a look at it and it seemed to fit our bill pretty well. A bit small, but it will do for now.

So we will probably sign the lease and move in next week.

Elsewhere

How is this situation elsewhere? I know space in Berlin is pretty cheap that you can get awesome office in the city center affordably. I hear that the UK is rife with archaic claptrap when it comes to regulations and lease agreements.
How are situations in let’s say Denmark or the US?

This Friday Jeroen Visser organized the knowledge day for the mailing list of Dutch internet creatives in Delft. Various speakers from the creative internet disciplines presented on their work and ideas.

I met Jeroen at last year’s Reboot and I couldn’t miss this interesting and affordable event right in my backyard.

Design research in branding

André Weenink of design firm Booreiland was the first presenter and he presented his findings on research in design branding by applying generative techniques.

His research forced on getting insight into the user experience of customers of Sissy Boy and he did this by having a representative set of customers of the company create artefacts that they thought were Sissy Boy.

There are several techniques to do design research: question customers with interviews, questionnaires or other means, observe customers in construed or natural surroundings and deduce principles from their behaviour. André opted for a third technique to let his participants create their ideal vision and in doing so communicate with their experience.

The things that were generated were diaries, graphics, collages and other objects in workshops with the selected customers. From the stuff that was created principles and patterns were deduced by André which he then translated in a brand identity and a visual vocabulary that could be used by Sissy Boy in their future communications.

The advantages of these generative techniques are that they are fun, they allow for empathy with the user and co-creation with users and different departments of the company. The result is not a boring report which is thrown over the fence but a rich set of human created data.

Downsides are that it is an intensive process involving a lot of effort and creating a lot of material that needs to be synthesized. The reach is limited by the selection of the number of people, physical presence required for some steps and no use of online facilities.

One of the questions that André asked the audience was how to use online means within a process such as this. This discussion quickly strayed to various designers being very concerned by the integrity of their design process and the influence of the designer and the various departments in the company on the end product.

Generative techniques in interaction design

I think it is a more interesting question to ask how to use generative techniques in interaction design for the web. A lot of design for the web uses the first two techniques, question and observe, to gain insight into the requirements and wishes of their users. Users are observed and then interaction designers, web designers and developers fit what they have seen into the structures they are familiar with.
I haven’t heard of generative techniques being applied so much. Having users create their ideal vision of a website seem to me to be an opportunity to create websites which are better attuned to users’ wishes and open to free and fun interaction.

A generative technique for webdesign would be to ask users what they would like a website to do for them. So what kind of a web experience would users design if they could do it themselves? I think the results of such a workshop with prospective users could be very interesting and revealing. Especially because users are in no way constrained by technical feasability and only somewhat by pre-existing concepts.

Probably none of the resulting concepts could be created outright but the design synthesis of those user wishes would probably result in a website that is better attuned to users and more fun for them to use. Users increasingly want to make their own web experiences and at least have a say in them. Most websites currently are very boring and constrain themselves to what is easy to create in rails. I think this is a gap that should be bridged.

Flash and HTML, tips for a happy marriage

Bob Corporaal showed that since Flash8 the external interface and javascript bridge part enable reliable and direct communication between Flash and the DOM. He then proceeded to show how you can use communication with javascript to solve gross deficiencies in Flash.

Picture by Robert Jan Verkade

I see how the techniques he demonstrated fix real problems but mostly these are problems not worth having. Flash is so ridiculously crippled that by using it you break pretty much everything: text selection, scolling, text resizing to name just a few extremely basic features which are missing in Flash. By talking to the DOM it is possible to fix these problems piecemeal but you can never be sure you’ve got every one of them. Most regular Flash developers don’t even bother with fixing the basic stuff let alone make an accessible and progressively enhanced version. To sum it up: things which are not easy to do in your platform are essentially absent.

Mark Wubben then showed an example of progressive enhancement using Flash and sIFR to display custom fonts on pages. Mark himself admits that it is a hack and should be used sparingly, but at least he takes care to have the Flash break as few things as possible. Web fonts are already working in current builds of Safari and Opera and display any font you like using native rendering. There is some discussion going on about font piracy but that is mostly academic.

IC Pixel Art

Arjan Westerdiep gave a presentation on how he creates pixelart. You can see some of his work on his site Drububu.

Picture by Robert Jan Verkade

Curious was that he had written a C program to calculate the differences between subsequent frames of his animations to save on space so as not to use Quicktime. I am pretty sure that Quicktime with most current codecs already implements its own highly optimized version of differential image compression or motion compensated video encoding but this presentation was not really for asking about whys.

Why do people create?

Gert Hans Berghuis from internet firm Fabrique talked about the rationales for user generated content.

He listed a number of reasons to the question: Why do people generate content?

• because they need something
• because of curiosity
• to come to terms with emotions
• to come to terms with their surroundings
• to do good, to contribute
• for recognition
• to be part of a group or greater whole
• to show off knowledge/skills
• to reflect
• to make money

This is a pretty generic list of motivations which can be used to explain many actions including why people create works.

He also discussed intrinsic and extrinsic motivations. It is believed that adding an extrinsic motivation for something for which there was an intrinsic motivation, kills the intrinsic part. Some sites which rely on crowdsourcing have tried to incorporate some sort of revenue sharing to keep the users happy, but these systems both destroy intrinsic motivation and stimulate gaming the rules.

I think anybody creating content on a website should keep in mind that they are in fact sharecropping on somebody else’s land and they have hardly any standing if the owner of the lands decides to sell it or make broad sweeping changes. Sites usually try to make their users happy, but sometimes different motivations can take over. Users have the single recourse of taking their activities elsewhere, though currently it is the question if they can take their data with them.

That session was the last after which the event was concluded with drinks and dinner.

Eelke and I are in the process of investigating office space options in Delft to form a coworking space of some sorts. Eelke currently is somewhat more urgently looking for living quarters, having recently returned from Berlin.

For the coworking space we want to have a 20-25m2 office (space to be negotiated) in Delft’s center where we can both go every day to keep our semblance of office hours, exchange ideas and create a space where people can find us.

I’m aiming for 2-4 people in the office to start with, preferrably with some fixed people but with some flex spaces as well. If that goes well, we can always expand.

If you know of anything suitable or if you are interested in joining us get in touch. We think it can be a lot of fun and add to our creativity and productivity.

It’s been a while and it’s somewhat too late to wish everyone a good year but Open Coffee will continue in 2008. The next event will be in Delft on February 11th, 2008 (Upcoming event).

Location: Coffee Company (large table), Market Square Delft
Time: 09:00 (till 10:00 or so)

What is Open Coffee? Open Coffee is a gathering for web and startup minded individuals to get together and talk about any topic that comes to mind while drinking some cofee. A pleasant start of the day with some familiar and some new faces talking about interesting stuff.

See you there! Post stuff you want to talk about as comments to this post.

Picture of a previous such event:

We just had the first incarnation of Open Coffee Delft in Bacinol (announcement) and it was a fun event, just as small scale as the Web 2.0 drinks of last Friday but no less fun. Jeroen Visser and I were joined by Kilian Valkhof and Redmar Kerkhoff. Reinier and Mik Nijhuis unfortunately were not able to make it.

Though small, I see a lot of potential in the event format and the diverse mix of people who are mostly doing pretty interesting things. We discussed al sort of thing such as work, FOWA, Mac, Linux, Open Source, branding, OpenID, Processing art, improvements in Leopard, cameras and the likes. Plenty of cool stuff and lots more to talk about at our next meeting in Rotterdam in two weeks (Upcoming).

Two weeks after that we might be headed back to Delft, if we can secure a nice venue here, or else we might head out to the Hague. And Jeroen talked about a gathering of internet creatives that he is planning on November 30th.

For up to date information and all relevant links see the Open Coffee page here on Four Starters.

In the Summer we had done a small series of OpenBeer events on Friday afternoons. Now that Winter is approaching we thought we would resume the series in Delft with official OpenCoffee meetings.

The idea for now is to have biweekly meetings on Tuesday mornings at 09:30 somewhere in Delft. The next meeting is October 9th at 09:30 at Bacinol (Wateringsevest 38) at the office of Jeroen Visser.

Join us webprofessionals in the Delft area to have some coffee and discuss business and events.

We have an upcoming event and a Google Group you can subscribe to if you want updates on the event.

See you guys October 9th.

We’ll be having a little fourstarters/tipit.to get-together in Delft tomorrow (Thursday). If you’re around the area, feel free to drop in. We’ll be on the beestenmarkt around 15:00.

Also see the upcoming event: http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/239405/.

Update: Now with pictures:

Yesterday we had the second edition of Open Beer Delft. Turnout wasn’t as large as we had hoped, but a good time was had by all.

The event was livecast using the WiFi present and the technology from ustream.tv which we reported about earlier.

Newcomer this time was Crijn Bouman from Epyon. Epyon is a startup company of Yes!Delft who make superfast charging batteries. Their first gizmo which is due out, you plug into the wall and it charges itself in a minute and you can then use it to charge cell phones and other small devices on the road.
They are working on getting the technology into laptops which would be a godsend. Imagine charging your Macbook battery in 1 minute.

Next week the event can go on as usual but I will not be able to make it. I am going to setup a notify mailing list for these meetings. If you want to be added to that, e-mail me or post in the comments here.

Yesterday the first Open Beer in Delft took place and it was something of a succes. Turnout may have been low with five people attending but new people were met and interesting conversations took place.

I talked to Redmar Kerkhoff who I already knew from a previous Barcamp Amsterdam and who also studies at DUT. Redmar is all over the place and we talked about graphics programming, intelligent devices, Ruby on Rails and Erlang.
I also got to talk with our other attendee Bart, who has a website (Where was it at again?) and who installed the wireless network at De Plataan.

A lot of people either could not make it today or were otherwise detained but that is not a loss to the format as there is enough interesting stuff to talk about with the people who were there. I didn’t even get to talk to Reinier because he had to leave early.

So let’s see what this grows into with some consistent attention. Next edition is next Friday and will probably start some 15 minutes later.

If you guys have any websites of yourself that you want to plug or have anything to add, put it in the comments.

Just to remind everyone. Late this afternoon, we will have the first version of Open Beer Delft. A networking event for web professionals and independents in the greater Delft area.

Besides the launch of this event, we will use today to formally launch this weblog.

Time and place: 18.00, het Klooster (Vlamingstraat 2)

Read the original announcement.