Milestone

This is the 400th post on this blog, Yay!
Hyper Island keeps me pretty busy. Many things are going on at the same time. First we have the main seven weeks assignment to create an interactive experience for a french clothing brand. Second we received a brief from Goodby, Silverstein + Partners who are visiting enxt week to create a campaign based around 5 senses and pitch it to them with finished designs. Third we're gathering a team and ideas in order to produce the main promotion site for our class. And in my spare time I'm working on briefs for upcoming competitions like One Show and D&AD, as there is no time scheduled for this in our course. Busy, but awesome. Back to work. Thanks for reading.

Motion Week

We just ended motion week, wich I could not fully enjoyed as my Macbook crashed on me on monday. RIP hard drive. So I only joined in the After Effects fun yesterday and made this short contribution above. The brief was to do any kind of film with the topic swine flu for 5-10 seconds.

In your face interface

We started a new module at Hyper Island called Advanced Interface Design. We received another big assignment for the next seven weeks, to design an interactive experience for the french clothing label Le Laboureur. The group I'm in is the same as for the IDEO workshop and consists of Joacim, Linn, Me, Mary and Paula.



The content provider for this module is Daniel Ilic, creative director at North Kingdom. The first three weeks so far are structured around software knowledge. We had a flash week, now we're having a motion week, and next weeks is all about 3D. Lectures in this module include farfar, Perfect Fools, Microsoft Labs, Visual Art, Goodby, Silverstein & Partners and North Kingdom
The result of the module has to be based on interactive storytelling including gameplay - let's see what we make of it.

The impact of new technology on advertising

I received an email from Sital, a student at the London College of Communication asking me for help with questions regarding her dissertation. I remember how much bloody work it was to write my own back at Bucks so I decided to help. Maybe some of you would like to join the conversation and share opinions on his topic 'The impact of new technology within graphic design, specifically within the advertising industry'. Here the questions including my short answers:

1. Do you think that digital campaigns pose a threat to the more traditional forms of campaigns? Why?

I think both traditional and digital campaigns should co exist and work closer together. It's about traditional advertising telling stories about brands using . Then digital campaigns should pick up on his and engage people further with those ideas and stories and start conversations with them. There's a great article on the BBH Labs blog about that: If you want a conversation say something interesting.

2. Idea vs. Media. Do you think campaigns nowdays are getting too carried away with the media rather than the 'big idea'? Why?

Yes, there are different kinds of campaigns, some that use media in a new way, and other that just rely on great storytelling (strong & big ideas). I think we need both, the ones that get carried away with media are good because they explore the boundaries of what can be done. But then once the technology is 'exploited' campaigns are created that use a new technology or a new media and connect it with the story of a brand in a meaningful way. I prefer the later ones, but as mentioned before, boths are valid things. A current example for this is augumented reality. A year ago just using this media/technology was enough to create a buzz for a brand, now agencies must work much harder to come up with ways to use augumented reality in a relevant way for the brand. They cannot just play the novelty card anymore.

3. What do you think the future of advertising (online) will hold? Why?

Media knowledge will be crucial in order to create tailored concepts to reach people in a relevant way. On the other hand we might see more engaging campaigns once creatives will manage to combine digital media knowledge with great storytelling skills, disciplines that are somewhat seperated in the advertising industry today. We might see more specialized creatives that will collaborate closer with partners from other areas, for example storytellers + technologists. And there should be more hybrid creatives that will be able to span big stories over multiple channels all in a relative way rather than just being replicated in a different format. I would wish for more interactive and engaging stories being told around products and brands.

UBERBULI

Remember my former partner Kristin? She's the one I started this blog with three years ago. She's still doing awesome things in London and just started a new project with her creative partner Nora: Überbuli

It's a duo of a crazy German and an even crazier Hungarian hunting for creative projects in advertising by doing all sorts of things to initiate that. They've got some work up over at carbonmade you might be interested in. They're planning more things in the near future – so stay tuned and join their twitter fellowship if you're curious about the adventures of those girls @uberbuli

Intense Energy

Robbin & I spent the last 6 days working on a submission for the Young Guns Student competition 2009. We entered the open brief category with a digital advertising idea for the energy drink BURN this morning, just before deadline:



We want to involve users in the brand promise 'Intense Energy' of the energy drink BURN. Through a game where players and teams fight each other for energy, using their mobile phones as weapons. You point & shoot at your opponents mobile device, if you hit - his energy decreases. By scanning a BURN can the player receives an energy boost. Challengers advance in ranks and compete in leader boards.

Bring it to life

The new ad from Guinness drops the 'Good thing come to those who wait' line and introduces 'Bring it to life'. I don't know about the strategy, it's seem more generic than the previous one, but maybe I'm missing a point. Yet the ad itself and the storytelling within it is stunning. By AMV/BBDO London.

The Hyper Island Way

During our first idea development session in module 2 we were filmed in order to give people a little glance what Hyper Island is about. This is the result.

Workshop with IDEO

One of the highlights of the course so far was a three day hands on workshop with IDEO. We had Fredrik Aidehag & Juho Parviainen from the Munich and London office of IDEO over at Hyper Island to give us a lecture and conduct a workshop on human centered design - just the way IDEO work themselves.

We worked in new groups for this assignment and each group identified a local business in Stockholm and approached them with this project. My group consisting of Linn, Ahmed, Mary, Joacim & Paula worked with a high-end hair salon in central Stockholm. The process that followed was divided into four main areas: Insight, Synthesis, Idea development and Prototyping.

Insight was about observing and understanding the scenario. We spend a day at the hair salon talking to employees, interviewed customers, documented the user experience and looked into all touch points of the business. We also talked to 'extremes' - people who would never use this kind of service and people who have very high demands on such a service. All this was documented in word, picture and video.

After the insight phase we started the synthesis phase: We gathered and structured different user stories, using the data from interviews. This phase was about framing opportunities from the researched material. We clustered observations and connected them with each other in order to extract behavioral insights. Having identified areas of opportunity we formulated several 'How might we...' questions - question that we would use in the next step, the brainstorming to develop ideas around them. Examples: How might we get people to be braver about new hairstyles? How might we lessen the feeling of risk of a bad haircut? How might we help people communicate what they want in a clearer way?

Brainstorming: to be honest, I've been in a few brainstorming session but never in a very effective one - I was never a fan of this type of idea development process. But IDEO showed us ways to facilitate effective sessions to harness the creativity of a larger group, and it worked a treat. Here are the 7 rules of brainstorming as used by IDEO:

rule #1 defer judgement
there are no bad ideas at this point because there's plenty of time to judge after

rule #2 encourage wild ideas
it's the wild ideas that often provide the breakthroughs and we can always bring ideas down to earth later, we new paths for non obvious ideas

rule #3 build on the ideas of others
think 'and' rather than 'but'

rule #4 stay focused on topic
you get better output if everyone is disciplined

rule #5 one conversation at a time
that way all ideas can be heard and built upon

rule #6 be visual
sometimes a picture really can speak a thousand words

rule #7 go for quantity, not quality
set an outrageous goal and surpass it!

Besides those rules, which are both obvious and crucial, there are other key points to turn the brainstorming session into an effective one. The group size should be quite big, 7-10 people is a good number, to keep the tempo of the session high. There should be a time limit, the session should be scheduled for a short time, but this time should be used effectively. But most of all, the work and research done beforehand helps the greatest deal: having the right focus or 'How might we...' questions to steer the group seemed to be the most helpful thing.

Using all those tools we generated an enormous amount of ideas in a short time around our chosen opportunity areas and after evaluating them in our team we settled for one specific direction: The hair salon we were working with has a rather creative approach, they want their customers to take more risks with their hair and be more adventurous. For this we focused on a voice controlled digital mirror that helped the customer and the person cutting the hair to explore more and daring possibilities.

Entering the fourth, last and most fun phase of human centered design: Prototyping or build to think. The solution we came up with had to be prototyped within 2 hours so we could share it with the course for feedback and further improvement. We had to take decisions on how things work down to the details, and act out the scenarios that could occur. The point here was to make the idea as real as possible as fast as possible. We had a great time building a corner of the hair salon and faking a digital & voice controlled display, emulating the experience.

Embarking on this new way of working was exciting and taught me the effective way of human centered design which opened up many creative opportunities within this project. I would have loved to work another week with the brilliant guys from IDEO. Going through the whole process with a specific client helped understanding this way to work and I cannot wait for the next project where I can put those methods to use. IDEO seems like an awesome place to work.

My three biggest learnings from this workshop:

• How to use behavioral research to gain insights and frame opportunity areas
• How to prepare and facilitate an effective brainstorming session in a big group
• How to bring an idea to life quick and dirty in order to see and improve its potential

Pictures by Paula Kreuger