72 hours for Peace

In case you missed this initiative by CP+B and Hyper Island this video gives a great overview about this great project.
 

Hyper Island on a wall

More numbers, more Hyper Island – sharing the love.

Hyper Island in numbers

Designed by Silje Lian

Hyper Island comes to the UK

It looks like Hyper Island is starting the very first long term program outside of Sweden – in Manchester. The course is called 'Interactive Media Design & Management' and goes on for 32 weeks.

Meanwhile at Hyper Island

Looks like there are some kick ass lectures and workshops going on back in Stockholm. I hope to visit Hyper Island again soon. Below is a video of the Digital Planning workshop they had back in October by Jonas Lidman and Mike Arauz.

Officially Graduated

Did I mentioned that I graduated from Hyper Island? Like 3 months ago. Now I finally received my Diploma by snail mail, all the way from Stockholm to Tokyo. It's been one of the most interesting things I've joined in my life, amazing in many ways. Once it's sunk in I'll write a summary of it. So for now, instead of framing my diploma and hanging it on the wall, the only digitally correct thing would be to hang it here, on my blog, right?

Interactive Art Directors on internships

Everyone from my class at Hyper Island IAD'10 is now on internship. As a very international class with high ambitions to rule the creative world we set out in different directions across the globe. Here's an overview where everyone is for their internships.

ACNE Advertising, Stockholm

ACNE Production, Stockholm

Åkestam Holst, Stockholm

Britny, Stockholm

Brooklyn Brothers, London

Champagne Valentine, Amsterdam

DDB, Stockholm

Deasign, Stockholm

Doberman, Stockholm

Droga 5, Sydney

Fantasy Interactive, Stockholm

Gray, Gothenburg

Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, San Francisco

Great Works, Barcelona

Great Works, Stockholm

Honesty, Stockholm

Mother, Buenos Aires

Naked, Stockholm

North Kingdom, Stockholm

Perfect Fools, Amsterdam

Recommended, Denmark

SID LEE, Montreal

South, Malmö

STOPP, Stockholm

Strawberry Frog, Amsterdam

Strip Digital, Stockholm

Superheroes, Amsterdam

Syrup, Stockholm

Syrup, New York

Today, Belgium

Tribal DDB, London

VCCP, London

Wieden + Kennedy, Tokyo

Your Majesty, New York

The map above might not be completely correct though, as it's based on Foursquare check-ins.

Last days of Hyper Island – for now

Friday was the very last scheduled day of Interactive Art Direction 2010 at Hyper Island. After the agency module was completed the class came together once again to reflect on our last months at Hyper Island and to evaluate them. After that we were to share four things in the class:

1. The greatest challenge so far during my time at Hyper Island

2. My greatest insight from my time at Hyper Island

3. One sentence to sum up my feelings about the internship

4. Two feelings right now and here

Many great insights were shared and it turned out quite sentimental as we all realized that the time in our little bubble has come to an end. Now, all of us 54 are about to leaving the school for our internships in different corners around the world. Next up: a list of where everyone's going to.

Cloudania

Tradition has it that every class graduating from Hyper Island creates a promotion site for the class and the students in it. After 3 months of work, that's what we've done last week. We decided we needed a place to be united after running if in different directions of the glove, and the only place would be the cloud. So we've created Cloudania, our very own digital nation. Please visit our nation and tell me what you think: http://www.cloudania.com

There was a whole bunch of people involved in this big project, kudos to all of my class mates. My role in this project: I was part of the core team steering the project as well as being part of the concept group. On top Robbin and I were responsible for the intro movie on the landing page.

There are also three great videos created by Kenneth Larsson showing our Cloudanian way:

Interview with David Droga

Right in the second module of Hyper Island back in September we were investigating the Future of the media industry. For this my group and I were lucky enough to get David Droga, founder of Droga5, on the phone for 20 minutes to ask him a few questions and get his opinions on where our industry is heading. I've been meaning to share the interview some time ago so here's the full transcript. There's also a audio recording of it, but the quality is rather suboptimal. I need more practise in interviewing people I guess :)

Wal: Hello David, it’s nice to speak to you, I’m really excited. I’m calling together with some people, we’re all sitting here in Stockholm at Hyper Island and we’re curious if we could ask you a couple of questions?

Dave: Sure, we have so many Swedes in our office now, I’m feeling like I'm talking to Swedes all day.

Wal: Ha, nice one. Basically, the first module we’re doing right now in our Interactive Art Director course is about finding out about the future of the media industry. So we’d like to ask you as one of the leaders of this industry and as a person who people look up to, what gets you excited at the moment in the industry?

Dave: It's a very broad question, and if I knew all the answers, I would print them and sell them off. I would be a Billionaire right now. I think there's no question that the industry is probably at its most fragile and exciting points. There's fragmentation and there's opportunity about. But by the way, is that question specific to just digital or?

Wal: Well, digital and advertising obviously, because you guys are able to combine those two seamlessly it seems.

Dave: We try not to separate them. It's all what's relevant and what's effective. There's no question that more often than not, digital plays a heavy part in that. But there still has to be as much thought into how and why we do it, as oppose to just doing it. I think there is still a lot of wasted money in digital media. People see that it's a segment that's growing and booming so they put a lot of money into it, but there are not putting as much thought into it. It's kind of crazy because I find bad digital advertising actually more intrusive and more offensive than bad traditional advertising. Because you know, traditional advertising, all be it TV or print, you almost condition to accept advertising as part of that. But online, just by the nature of why it booms so much and how it operates, it's much more under your own control. Advertising sort of interrupts and bombards you, it's much more offensive unless it's actually seamless.

Wal: If you don't separate it that way how does your creative department work, do you have traditional creatives and digital creatives?

Dave: We have one big creative department that has people from different backgrounds. There are people that have digital backgrounds. But at the end of the day it all comes down to the strategy or coming up with the idea or the implementation. When we concept it's not necessary a traditional team, it's sort of a hybrid of creatives. It might be some traditional creatives but in this hybrid model there's also some creatives that come from a digital background. Those digital creatives may be cracking the TV, just as the traditional creative team could be cracking a digital brief. Clearly when it comes down to actually execution, that's where you sort of tap into peoples backgrounds and specialities. It's not as linear as it was in the past, where traditional teams cracks it and then it's passed down to be executed by a digital team. That seems like an old fashioned model. Our model is almost flipped. If you compare it to a train, in the old model it used to be that the train would pick up passengers when it went along, it would pick up a traditional team, then it would pick up a digital team, then it would pick up producers, you know what I mean? Now in the opposite model, it's a train shedding passengers, so we start with everybody at the table. And we loose people as we go along.

Wal: In our course we are actually trying to become one of those hybrid creatives and combine design, strategy and technology into one thing. What do you expect of those hybrid creatives? Maybe a direction what way we could shape our course in order to succeed in that?

Dave: You have to be quite neutral in the beginning, you can't be seduced by a specific medium. If you sit down at the table with a medium in mind then you immediately limit yourself. What we're trying to do is to liberate our creatives by saying – ok let's start at the beginning and see whatever idea seems the right idea – and then we look at the medium to exploit it in, as opposed to starting with a TV commercial or a viral or a website. It never starts that way, it always starts with the idea before we get into any execution. We never start with an execution.

We don't expect our creatives to be planners, I do like when they have a strategic point of view, but we have a very strong strategic department that's independent. But I do like the creatives to be more than just whacky creatives, I like them to understand the insights into why they come up with ideas. The best ideas are not just creative for the sake of being creative. They are grounded in something. They definitely come from an insight.

Wal: We are a quite a digital focused school, but you're coming from a rather tradition background. Could you give us any tips what skills we should not neglect to take over from the traditional guys.

Dave: I forged my career by doing traditional stuff in the beginning, because that's what was asked of me. I'm your classic creative. I dont' care what the canvas is, I just wanna be creative. In the beginning it was very much TV and print. But the reason I got excited by digital, and do still get excited by the potential of it, is that it's a three dimensional canvas. As an industry we pride ourselves being storytellers. And we used to be just storytellers that told a complete story. A 30 second commercial had a start, a middle and a finish. A print ad was all there on the page. But what's best about digital is that the story doesn't necessary ever finish. We instigate a story and it can evolve, so we are as much creatives as we are curators. Still we have the essence of being storytellers but we don't have to finish the story as such. Digital allows you to create something that can evolve. This can be through the contribution of the people you're aiming at or we can add other elements and you can bury things in it. That's why it's so fascinating when it's done well. It's less control but more exciting.

Wal: That's a great way to see it.

Dave: I always try to look at it, not how ideas are gonna be received by the client or by our peers, but in the real world. You want to be able to work with it, interact with it. What is it gonna make people feel as opposed to make them think?

Wal: If you've seen it all, what do you still get impressed by? We're obviously competing for the desks next to people like you to tap your minds. How can we impress you or other people that are that cutting edge?

Dave: To me, genuinely, the ideas that I like the most are the right ideas. Simply because they are not just creative for the sake of it, they are ideas that tap into real human truths and they're evoke some kind of emotion out of me. Obviously for it to be appropriate it has to be the right type of emotion for the right type of client. It's not just, oh that's weird or that's funny, or that's whacky. It provokes some sort of reaction which almost has a knock on effect. And that's what I think creative solutions should show, taking the ordinary and making it extraordinary. That's what I find really fascinating. Just being different for the sake of it – anyone can be different for the sake of it. I think that's easy. But doing something with the ordinary, that's where the most interesting things happen, it's such a lateral way of looking at the everyday.

Wal: So it's about taking insights and connecting them with emotions.

Dave: Yeah, that's what's so fascinating with advertising, if it's done well. You probably heard it before but but it's that balance between art and commerce. That's what excites me the most. We have boundaries, an artist who is painting on a wall or a canvas doesn't have boundaries, they can do anything they want. Which is exciting and intimidating and takes a special kind of person. But we have the perimeters and mandatories, which is kind of restricting. And that's what I love - how do we solve that puzzle with all the restrictions we have? Sometime the most creative thing is the person who has the most restraints. Restraint is a really hard thing in our industry, people usually go too far, too over the top. That's why I go back to simplicity and it's also grounded in something that is based on a human truth. And you can actually be more creative with it because you've got an incentive to go back to. Does that make sense?

Wal: It sounds very passionate if you talk about it. I very much believe that it's a lot of fun coming up with those things.

Dave: It's an amazing amazing tough but amazing industry. We basically get to be creative with other people's money and other people's businesses. With that comes great responsibility. The conversations I'm having these days are so much more interesting than the conversations I was having five years ago. I could almost predict the types of conversations I would go in and have with the client five years ago. Now what's so exciting about it, is that you can't predict. That makes it that much more exciting and intimidating. We really get to stretch our imagination more. I'm sure all you lecturers will tell you the same thing but, I really believe that it's probably the best time one can be in our industry. There used to be quite a traditional way to get into the industry. You go into the industry and you work your way up the ladder, you start with print ads or radio or brochures and earn the right to go up to something that would sort of become more mad. Where it is now you can strike a chord right from the get go with something that's really small and digital. And there's also opportunity for clients now, it used to be the battle of budgets. The number one and number two made the most most noise. Now number three, four, five and six have as much right to create something that has impact. It's not necessary the money that gives you the impact but the thinking. And who doesn't want to be in an industry, where all this craziness makes us think harder and better. Assumption does no longer exist in our industry, which is the best thing for a creative industry.

Wal: We try to focus a lot on group dynamics and processes, how to come up with those great ideas and how to push them further. We'd like to know how you keep the culture of Droga5 focused in that sense. And how do you get those kind of results? How do you work with your agency culture?

Dave: You know, I keep it really simple, I'm pretty direct about what I like and what I don't like. But at the same time I don't have people fleshing out a million things really deep and wasting their time. I'd rather look at twenty ideas that are top line in the beginning, so it's more of a conversation. And I always challenge people. What is the ramification of what we're doing? What is the ripple effect? My objective is to build the most influential agency in the world, not necessarily the biggest or not necessarily the most creative, you know I mean? To be the most influential you have to do things that matter, you have to do things that actually have an effect. By default you have to be creative, by default you have to work with interesting people, by default you have to have certain size. The influence of the work is what gets me excited. We talk a lot about what are we doing, what's the purpose of it, what's the real effect of it? It's such a competitive landscape out there.

Wal: Wow, influence is a great goal, definitely.

Dave: You can never get to the finish line but it's a lense to judge yourself. It stops us from working with, you know, let's say crappy clients. It stops us from hiring crappy people. We all have the same mindset. What are we doing today that's helping us getting closer to being more influential? Influential for our clients and influential for our industry.

Wal: You guys obviously have influence, everyone speaks of your work. Maybe you can tell us what the industry's future will look like with your influence? A cliche question but we're quite curious.

Dave: I always say – why did I start the agency? I started the agency to reinvent my advertising industry not anybody else's. The amount of different categories and I don't mean clients, I mean the other industries we can collaborate with and influence – is extraordinary. We don't have to try and pretend to be the movie industry now, we don't have to try and pretend to be the record industry now. But our thinking can influence those industries, and we can collaborate with them. There isn't a business in the world that can't benefit now from collaborating with smart marketing and creative people. And that shines a light on the good agencies out there. I don't know what the future is, but all I know it's fucking exciting.

Wal: Yes and we are excited now.

Dave: It's a great time. Look, it doesn't make it any easier. We work our asses off here, and we don't get it right all the time but more often than not we do. Because we're obsessed about getting it right, not about making it the most creative. You know by default as I said, I think it is usually very creative, if your objective is to get it right. Then you find that you suddenly open up new ways that you never thought you can possibly do. We try not to be intimidated by the attitude of 'that's too hard to pull off'. If it's the right idea, more often than not things start aligning and you can pull things off.

Wal: Have you ever been to Stockholm David?

Dave: I've been once actually, I went last year. I wasn't there long enough but it was such a beautiful time. My mother went to school in Stockholm.

Wal: If you ever want to come back to Stockholm, we'd love to have you as a lecturer to share all your thoughts with 100 other Hyper Island people who would really be interested in what you have to say.

Dave: I certainly will. I have a lot of time for Hyper Island, as I say we have a couple of people from Hyper Island here.

Wal: What's your idea of Hyper Island? What do you think we can bring to the table? What should we continue doing?

Dave: From what I know, i just think that you guys are a little braver than most advertising schools out there. You're sort of, more forward facing than a lot of other schools. Who knows why? Is it something in the water? Who knows what it is? What you get is a momentum going, and everyone feeds on that, which is how agencies grow. You know, how does a good agency grow? Because it sort of gets it own confidence going and a standard. And that standard builds everyone around it. That's what's obviously going on at Hyper Island. And that's what we're trying to do here. You know, no one has all the answer and I always say, sometimes we're sprinting forward other times we're falling forward - but at least we're moving forward. And that's my goal.

Wal: They keep telling us here to leave our comfort zone and to do things we don't normally do, and that's kind of like what I'm doing right now, it's completely mind blowing for me to talk to you and get all your thoughts, so I'm really happy.

Dave: But that's what I say, it's what you believe in. That's my only thing for every creative I say, try and do work that appeals to you, that you believe in. Don't try and do work that's weird for the sake of it, because you'll end up just with weird work, that's not grounded in anything. It's easy to do stuff that's bizarre, and different. But to do work that's fucking great and right is harder. Sometimes you have to leave things on the table that, you know, makes you laugh, but aren't necessarily right. You have to try always to... I don't know. Who knows? You'll find your groove and everyone does.

Wal: Nice, pretty cool. Any last words for Hyper Island?

Dave: Keep doing what you're doing and I'm looking forward to have more Hyper Island people in our office. There are five Swedes in our office already. A little mini Sweden.

Wal: We say Tack for thank you here in Sweden. Thanks a lot for sharing your thoughts.

Dave: Good luck with it all.

Forever & Young wins

A swift update from the current module: we got news today that our Hyper Island agency won 2 out of 3 pitches. As this module is a lot about the economics of a agency, these wins make Forever & Young the top earning Hyper Island agency. A good reason for a glass of apple juice, cheers.

Pfadfinderei at Hyper Island

Today we got served some fresh & inspiring 1st class design shit straight from Berlin based creative collective Pfadfinderei. They have been working with design, motion and music visualization since 1999. They were represented here by one of the seven members, Codec. He revealed to us a look behind their curtains and their creative process including research, references and tests before arriving at the stunning finished work. It was surprising to see how much conceptual thoughts they had behind their creations. Other insights from this lecture included:

• Establish a collective with like minded people to keep pushing yourself, sharing rocks
• Get your administration stuff straight so you can focus on being creative
• Start a playground where you can work on your own projects to balance commercial work
• Keep reinventing yourself and keep doing things differently

Check out the videos below and make sure not to miss out on more of their work on their website.

Module 7 - The Agency

My Hyper Island time is soon running out, after this one there is only the internship module left. But before that, one of the toughest and most interesting modules: The Agency.

The class is split into 5 agencies with 10-11 people in each. Those agencies have CEOs, project managers, designers and creatives. All agencies have three clients each and the possibility to pitch for more clients as well. All assignments are real and paid for by the clients with actual budgets, a pleasant pressure on delivering great work. My agency goes by the name of Forever & Young, we're 11 people. Right now I'm in charge of the current pitch for a real estate company here in Sweden – as a process leader, facilitating a group of four creatives and helping them work towards the winning idea. It's a nice change for a couple of days stepping back from creating ideas. It's more about structuring the idea development process and trying to create a creative atmosphere in a group in order to help them be more effective – a great learning experience. Next week I'll continue the work on one of our clients as an art director.

Rebranding the Swedish Armed Forces

Below are the results from our last module Client, Design, Strategy & Branding.

BACKGROUND AND STRATEGY

Sweden has not been in war since 1813. The focus for the army is now peacekeeping abroad. Starting 2010 the Swedish military service is no longer mandatory. So the Swedish Armed Forces want to attract talent – brain rather than muscles – to fullfill their missions abroad. Our challenge was to rebrand the Swedish Armed Forces from a traditional defensive collective into a modern employeer.

THE OLD BRANDING

THE NEW LOGO

We got rid of the sword that symbolizes attack. We kept the shape of the shield, it’s made by two hands that clasp together, a metaphor for conflict resolution. The shield could also be seen as the ladder for personal development. On top we have the three crowns combined into one.

CAMOUFLAGE OF DIVERSITY
Camouflage is used for disguising yourself in the nature. We turned this around and created a new camouflage that is all about showing yourself. It reflects the diversity within the organization.

THE SUB BRANDS
ONLINE, CORPORATE & PRINT
THE GROUP PROCESS

Strategy, Idea & Design by:

Robbin Ingvarsson, Fredrik Holmberg, Kristina Herngren, Anke Buchta, Simon Schlüter & Waldemar Wegelin

World of an Intern?

Next friday we'll have CB+P Boulder here at Hyper Island Stockholm to give us a presentation and recruit talent for their internship program.

Client, design, strategy & branding

Module number 6 has been running for three weeks now and it's called 'Client, design, strategy & branding' – big words in one sentence, but it fits. We're a new team of six people working on one big client together with DDB Stockholm – The Swedish Armed Forces. The challenge is to reposition them as a forward thinking brand that is a viable employer beyond duty the on ones country. Due to the limited amount of time we compressed the research stage into a week and developed a strategy that points our way. We assembled various visual identity directions and had a first presentation to the client with this selection of routes. Now we've settled on one of them and we're creating an identity across different medias that reflects our chosen strategy. The final presentation is this thursday – I am looking forward to share the results.

Recruiting talent from London

I'm back in Stockholm after a great weekend with Hyper Island in London. After the island2island exhibition on friday being a great success with over 200 visitors the saturday was filled with meeting applicants for next years course. I can't tell much about the process itself as it's best left to surprise when people apply – Hyper Island wants applicants to be rather unprepared. Thanks for W+K for hosting this event and thanks to Hyper Island for letting me be a part of it. Going through the application process from the other side was quite an insightful experience.

Hyper Island in London

The Hyper Island Recrutiment Tour is back on the road again. The first stop is London and it's happening next week January the 23rd. The location is Wieden+Kennedy's Platform. I'm going as a student representative and will show a quick presentation about student life at Hyper. I'm very curious to meet new talented applicants, if you're intrigued apply here. The prior day is filled with Hyper activities as well, in the evening W+K is hosting a fabulous exhibition with work from the Digital Media class of Hyper Island with a surprise guest speaker – all information is to be found here island2island.

I am in the process of putting a presentation together and would like to have some input: What would you like to know about Hyper Island? Please leave a comment.

Advanced Interface Design

After seven weeks our fourth module is over. Daniel Ilic from North Kingdom was in charge for all the content for the advanced interface design module and his agency just released their long awaited showreel which shows the kind of work they are doing:

What is advanced interface design? According to Daniel it's about 'Creating untraditional ground breaking cutting edge user experiences in digital interfaces.' He also quoted Simon Pestridge from Nike 'We don't do advertising any more. We just do cool stuff.'

We had plenty of great lectures from places such as DDB, farfar, Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, North Kingdom, Perfect Fools, Microsoft, Visual Arts and Amsterdam Worldwide. We learned about interactive storytelling, production processes, gameplay, motion graphics, 3D production, flash animation, prototype based development and much more.

Out big assignment was to create a concept for an interactive experience and we had the choice between a fashion brand and a charity. My group worked on the fashion part, Le Laboureur, a french working wear brand that wanted to appear on the map of a young and aware target audience. This is the result we created:

We decided to roll with the Jesus/worthy concept and focus on art direction and played with interactive sounds. When the Goodby, Silverstein & Partners assignment came along we shifted focus away from this assignment for two weeks so we ended rushing the production in the last few days. I hope that there will be a bit of time in the new year to iron some of the edges away that we left for now.

Being the process leader in our group I learned a lot about creative processes and how to facilitate them. We needed a slightly tighter production plan and should have been clearer on the individual roles. The biggest learning situation for me was the different goals of all team members and how to arrive on a common goal and steer towards it all together. Summed up I received a great learning outcome and I'm looking forward to the next team module so I can build on those learnings. But before that we have an individual assignment over the holiday break: Making a portfolio.

Hyper Island in a Nutshell

Only 7 days of Hyper Island are left in the year of 2009. There is a huge deadline hanging above our heads, so there's no time to write up all that's happening. The Goodby, Silverstein & Partners days were great with fantastic presentations and interesting insights. We had DDB Stockholm over here this week going through their Swedish Army work and today Amsterdam Worldwide was in the house to give individual feedback on our work. I'm participating in a creative Google Wave experiment and there's a new movie created by the Digital Media 2010 class about Hyper Island which I'm sharing here.