This portfolio documents the learning and creation process that took place during the Serious Games course of Anton Eliens in Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in 2016.
Thanks to the creative freedom and flexibility granted by Anton, the project forked into many fruitful side projects, some of which you may examine on this website. These projects are as following:
• Conceptualization of an online education platform codenamed 'Plato' in collaboration with Quincy Dalh of FRISSR (on this website)
• A system for publishing academically formatted papers online (this website), and an automated workflow.
• Inception of a series of essay on the state of academia (on this website)
• An experiment on Ximpel platform (on this website)
• A new visual task management workflow (not documented here)
• An information management and referencing solution for academic research (not documented here)
• And some other things
During these projects and the course, I learned a great deal and found the opportunity to create in line with my aspirations—something that would have not been been possible with a classical academician. Therefore, I extend my gratitude to Anton Eliens for the opportunity and his support.
I am John and I am a die-hard optimizer. My specialty is to make processes related to knowledge work easier. This involves researching and creating software that can make work easier and more enjoyable, designing workflows for optimal performance and inducing flow states, using gadgets in creative ways to make life more ergonomic, and perhaps most importantly, making information accessible so it can flow efficiently—from people to people, or from media to people. Educational design, be it by designing educational apps or visualizing academic information is my passion, and as en extension of this passion, it annoys the hell out of me to see an academic system that is using the methods of instruction and communication that belong to a past millenium. This strange dance of my obsession for good information design and my continuous exposure to bad design in academia (due to being a long-term resident of it), is sometimes a ridiculously unnecessary and fruitless fight, and sometimes a beautiful and creative process that makes me feel connected to my life's purpose.
This portfolio is created somewhere inbetween these states, and although it is far from making me feel proud and being perfect, I am happy with it. It is 80% fine, and I see being able to let go of it at this point as a sign of reunion with sanity after a few months of creative, obsessive, and adventurous work on this project (and an endless amount of side projects I somehow invented out of it) which yielded good results despite my already high workload.
The projects I started are far from being completed, but that is not the point. The point is: I feel happy because I started things that I finally don't mind keep working on for an unknown amount of time. And for that, I am grateful.
John (Can) Lokman, July 2016