At Big Spaceship, we have weekly show-and-tells where either a staff member presents a current project or a guest speaker talks about a topic that relates to their specialization. A few weeks ago, Todd Zaki Warfel, author of Prototyping: A Practitioner’s Guide and Principal Designer at Messagefirst gave a fascinating presentation on the value and practice of prototyping to our team. In his book, Todd writes, “Prototyping helps you get ideas out of your head and into something more tangible—something you can experience, work through, play with, and test.”

As was previously announced, our class library is available on GitHub. Our first installment explaining how we use some of these classes deals with one of the most recent additions to the library - OAuthBridge.

A big thanks to everyone who came out to see my talk at Flashbelt. As promised here are the slides and a little bit of code to help get you on your way. Also a huge thanks to Dave for putting on such a terrific conference. It was run so buttery-smooth and even had functioning wifi the whole time. Unbelievable. It was fantastic to see all the inspiring sessions and if you're anything like me, you couldn't wait to get back and try out all the new things you learned.

With the hope of gaining a deeper understanding of the people and culture of startups, last Friday I joined the Walkabout NYC, a city-wide open house event for technology startups organized by Harvest.

Looking at the relationship between a company’s physical space and its philosophy and work culture, I talked to staff members at five of the 21 participating companies to find out how their work space influences them.

Two months ago, I was a Foursquare addict. From the G train shuttle bus to the Duane Reade to the 88th police precinct, I checked in everywhere. However, because of the lack of real-world benefits and limitations in its game mechanics, I seldom check in to places anymore.

This post explores the thought process behind the live action game, Radar Blip, created by Big Spaceship strategy intern Jim Babb.  You can play it this weekend as part of the Come Out and Play festival.  Any readers of Think are invited to join us June 4th at 9pm at the Brooklyn Lyceum.

We’re all too familiar with the expression “Thinking outside the box”.  In fact, you’ve probably heard it enough times that it inevitably elicits an audible sigh anytime it is mentioned.  For bringing it up, yet again, I apologize.  However, rather than tread on the old ground of thinking inside or outside anything, I want to describe a better box.  One designed for the purposes of play and excitement.

Developed over years, matured through a long process of adding, removing rewriting, refining, curating, forgetting, re-adding, improving, collecting, enhancing, rewriting … hours of hard work by an amazing team. The Big Spaceship package is a collection of useful classes that help us to do our basic daily tasks faster so that we have more time to concentrate on the fun stuff.

Here it is, the public Big Spaceship AS3 Repository on github:
http://github.com/bigspaceship/as3

"You mustn’t say anything against the Machine," says the main character of E.M. Forster's The Machine Stops. Forster’s world is one that worships technology. Communication is virtual and constant. Like instant messaging. Friends in other countries materialize before you to chat. Like Skype. Information is omnipresent, but reverb outweighs originality. Like Twitter. Oh, and the story was first published in 1909.

Inspired by the documentation of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, our strategy team curated a list of links that illustrate how governments, NGOs and ordinary people are using media – both new and old – to document current events and encourage political engagement. Our interest lies in creative uses of technology – whether it is web-based or not.

It's time to add some baggage to the word "like".

While the conversation rages about Open Graph and Facebook's new grab to dominate the internet, I'm stuck on the change in semantics. Suddenly we're being prompted to "like" rather than "become a fan" of posts, pages and other content all over the web. This is more awkward than it might seem. No longer am I a "fan" of Coke or Guitar Hero, I'm now a... "liker"? "One who likes"? When I visit the brand's page, is that a "Like Page"? Maybe an "Online Community For Likers"? And don't banner ads seem a tinge bald and desperate when the call to action reads "Like Our Brand!"? It's a syntactic hornet's nest. So what is it about that four-letter-word that promotes it to such an integral position everywhere we look online?

Back in February, my friend Linzi, a designer at Odopod, was talking about how much she loves sending and receiving things by snail mail. She said it was "like a hug from far away - existing in a tangible object that (she) can't click a button to accidentally delete." Laura, another designer from Crispin Porter & Bogusky, thought this was an interesting concept, one that found its way into a perfect personal project: The Craft Swap.