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.

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

Understanding Group & Leader

The whole of last week we had an intensive course called the UGL (Understanding Group & Leadership) as a preparation for the year ahead at Hyper Island. It was very demanding and intense as we were there for almost 12 hours a day within the same group of people. Yet it was very worth it. There were many individual and group tasks that made us realize how we interact with each other and how we are perceived by others. In between the tasks we reflected on the happenings and the processes. And of course we were fed quite a lot of theory on feedback, leadership qualities and group dynamics.

For me the course was very helpful and if I keep using all the tools learned in the last week I can see myself becoming a much more effective part of a creative group. There are still two days left to reflect on the UGL before we start the next course on Thursday: Team building. All 40+ interactive art directors will go away for two days to a place north of Stockholm to practice group dynamics and become a functional team.

More pictures from last week are here.

D&AD at M&C

Last week we made our way to M&C Saatchi, where we had Tom and his partner Uche reviewing all of our D&AD advertising workshop work. We had five campaigns in ours but the guys didn't really dig most of them. Blimey.

The stuff they did like though we're accord with as well. So we're currently working with these strategies, to turn them into great campaigns for more suitable brands. And yes, we're quite excited with the outcome we have on our hands so far.

Overall we liked the advertising workshops, the briefs were not very ideal for a portfolio, as they are either charity brands (NSPCC) or very niche products (Rexel eco stationary, D&AD workshops). Nether less it was good practice. And we've met lots of nice people on the way. Thanks D&AD.

D&AD workshop portfolio

We are just collating all campaigns, and revising a few of them for a final D&AD advertising workshop book which we'll have to enter later today. It will then be sent to M&C Saatchi. They will look through them and give us feedback on all our work next week – should be quite interesting. We're pretty happy with most of the stuff in there. After that's done there's gonna be even more time to rock our own briefs.

Workshop Mania

This workshop at WDMP has been like two weeks ago but the pictures were lost in limbo – that's me not finding my camera cable. There's also a video clip of a creative team singing their idea on this workshop, but they didn't seem completely happy about it popping up online without their approvement. That should teach us a lesson about asking permission.

Anyway, the workshop last week was canceled, it'll happen this week instead. We'll be at WWAV & Leo Burnett, the briefs are to make a digital campaign for NSPCC for the former and a campaign against Drink Driving for Leo's. Charity all the way. All of this comes as a side dish with our placement at Adam&Eve that starts tomorrow. But Wait. That's not all. If works piles up, it does so in a serious way. There's something else coming up in two weeks time which is already stealing our sleep. It should be good and and it should fun. We're excited.

The Workshops Begin…

Last night we had our first D&AD workshop at Feel. It wasn’t an agency many of us had heard of but after a bit of research we soon realized they’ve done some pretty cool work. Chris Arnold, the CD and Partner ran a great first workshop. We didn’t touch on much advertising really, the session was more focused on creativity and communication in general. Chris also dabbled with some psychology and NLP, which was a bit of an eye opener.

For last nights brief, Chris asked us to put together a reaction diary for the week. And last night he explained why it was so important to be able to read reactions, as only then can be really evoke them. Chris talked about many things last night but I think the one point he wanted us to go away with was everything we do should get a reaction.

Here’s the template + instructions we were given, so if you want you can try it yourself.

D&AD Workshop – Introduction

17 young creatives and 6 agencies hosting sessions – sounds like it's going to be great fun! The introduction sessions for this years autumn D&AD advertising workshop was this Wednesday, at their office in Vauxhall. It started at 6 but of course we arrived late, blimey!

It was pretty easy going, after all the essential information we started with a simple creative exercise. We mixed into pairs of two and spent some time talking to each other before drawing a poster about the other person so we'll get to know everyone. After that we received some D&AD student briefs (random, the TfL brief was one of them) and worked on them for 15 minutes in the same pairs and presented to each other. Just a bit of fun, getting to know the group and getting comfortable presenting work in front of each other.

The first 'real' sessions will take place next week on Tuesday and will be hosted by the agency Feel. They already sent us a pdf called 'the Reaction Diary' which is quite interesting and promising. We're happy to be participating, we've already met some pretty cool people and of course it all ended in the pub – but enough talk, here are some pictures:

D&AD Workshop – WHSmith

Ok, we didn't make any copies of the campaign we submitted to qualify for the D&AD advertising workshop, as we've been pretty busy with Nike stuff at that time. But as we went to the introduction session on Wednesday we received our work back and we thought we'll share.

The brief was: Create a campaign to encourage parents to spend more quality time with their children, by showing the range of products that WHSmith has to keep all ages entertained.

Here are the two campaigns we sent in.


Jai prefers the first one but I like this one more. We don't know yet which agency did set the brief. Maybe we'll find out and ask what they preferred.



We had a couple more starting points we've submitted as lines:

• Adult Play Time
• Invest in your assets
• You'll need them once you're old
• Playing makes you younger
• Be a TV family
• Make time before they make you to
• Keep them younger longer

Say hello to good

In spite the summer's not really jazzing, everything's good. Things are sinking in and we are having a couple of days off. Jai is working part time at the airport and I'm doing some freelance packaging design, great fun.

Today made us especially happy. First we discovered a post on the W+K London blog about us. The Welcome to Optimism blog was the first one I started reading regularly, it introduced me to blogging and was one of the reasons I started a blog myself – so we're pretty chuffed to appear on there – a small dream comes true.

And if that's not enough to sweeten up the day, there's another one of our goals reached. We received an email from D&AD, we've made it onto the Advertising Workshop which will kick off next week. It's gonna be good. Every Wednesday, new creative people, drinks and food for our portfolio. Yummy! We might have even been smart enough to make copies of the work we've sent in. So if I'll find them I'll post the campaigns, the brief was WHSmith.

We hope your day was as good as ours, we all need some goodness nowadays to go with that boring weather – let's all say hello to good and it'll keep coming back.

Festive Delay

Looks like D&AD is taking it's time so it will not be until after Christmas/NYE until everyone will get the results about the Advertising Workshop. We are cool with that, let's enter festive mode and stop thinking about that stuff for a couple of weeks. Ho Ho Ho!

D&AD workshop work

The deadline for the workshop brief was an hour ago and the work arrived with them fine, so it means waiting for a response. I don't have a clue if they (whoever the judges are) will like the stuff, but I'll share it here. The first one contains the proposition, Organic Food made easy to Organic goes mainstream.

The second campaign submitted is a rather fun one, it's targeted more narrow, towards mothers. I'm curious about this one :)

Green workshop brief

(redesigned for my viewing pleasures)

I received the D&AD Workshop Brief. It is for 'As Nature Intended', an organic store chain in, located mainly in London. Does anyone have a clue who've set this brief?

I am kind of annoyed by it, don't get me wrong the brief isn't bad. No, the brief is alright in itself. Here are three products/brands that were used to set the last three D&AD workshop briefs:

• Ford Focus Flexifuel, a car running (partly) on renewable resources
• Government campaign to fight CO2 emissions made by cars
• As Nature Intended, an organic, and green store

Anyone sees the pattern? I'm getting a headache from this greenness. What to do?