First days at Hyper Island

Thursday the 6th and Friday the 7th of august were the first two days at Hyper Island in Stockholm. They were introduction days. We've met our co workers Micke & Sofia (and everyone else working for HI), they will be overseeing the interactive art director program for the next 45 weeks. I say co workers because there are no teachers at this course, no books, no classes, no homework, no exams and no grades. I will try to to recap what it's all about:

We received a lot of information, which will be repeated in the following few weeks with the aim that after this we will not get answers from our co-workers anymore and are only directed towards finding those answers ourselves. At Hyper Island we won't be judged and we won't receive any praise in any form. The education will be experience based and real life scenarios will be recreated as often as possible. We should regard Hyper Island not as a school – it's a job, a company we work at. We will work with real clients, we will have client meetings and a least 40 hour weeks.

There are multiple goals for this program:

• learn how to learn
• become problem solvers
• become innovative entrepreneurs
  
• learn about group dynamics

All of those with the most important one always upfront:
We have to be always at the cutting edge of digital communication and thinking.

The challenges we will face in order to fulfill those goals are numerous. We need to handle our expectations and forget the traditional school experience we all made. We need to repair the school damage. We need to be responsible to reflect about our doings and interact with others. We need to get our hands dirty and be as brilliant as we like, no one will stop us. Even if everything we do will have consequences for us we are encouraged to make as many mistakes as possible. And we need to be supportive to ourselves and the other participants of the course. It will be a lot about leaving our comfort zone and experimenting. Hyper Island is a laboratory that we will get access to, we will receive all necessary tools but it's up to us what we make of it.

The rest of the days were about introducing ourselves to the group with a presentation about who we are as persons. It was quite captivating to hear everyone's story – the group consists of some great characters which will make for a very exciting year.

It was all pretty mind blowing and those guys mean business. In order to prepare for all this, on Monday we will start our 5 day UGL course (Understanding Group and Leader). It will be an intensive program all about insight into group dynamics, conflicts, feedback, leadership and personal growth. Read more about it here.

We were told that we won't have time for anything else for the next 5-7 days as we'll be spending every waking moment within our UGL groups. So I'm off to bed and will begin the Hyper adventure in a couple of hours. This is so fucking exciting!