New addition to the Hyper Island Oktoberfest

Virtual world expert Tim Guest is coming to Stockholm to hold a lecture for the Hyper Island students on the 4th of october. Today we can announce that he will also participate in the grand opening party in the evening, where he will be interviewed by Resumé's Viggo Cavling.

Tim Guest is one of the main authorities when it comes to describing our brave new world. He has written extensively about the internet phenomena in The Guardian and The Daily Telegraph and has recently published his latest book "Second Lives" about internet communities.

Don't miss the chance to meet one of the great thinkers of today. Sign-up here.

Check out the Digital Media student blogs

The Digital Media students in Stockholm have been asked to start blogs as part of their "Experience Technology" module. Follow their work at the following adresses:

Grupp 1

"The intuitive thought is to smash the arduino board and tell it to fuck off"

Grupp 2

"And then it was time to do some magical brainstorming. A slow start resulted in a bunch of really crazy, crazy!, but fun, ideas. We also planned how to work the rest of this week."

Grupp 3

"Today we got our main task. To our disposal we have a wireless keyboard and mouse. We started taking apart the keyboard and the mouse, it was interesting to see how things worked under the surface. Once taken apart the keyboard shrunk to a tiny little chip."

Grupp 4

"Thanks to all the research we did yesterday we managed to find a source code very similair to what we are looking for."

Grupp 5

"Our idea is to make colorstrokes from movement of a person filmed by the webcam. And by letting the strokes have a long delaytime, many people can join and togheter make an artpainting. The funny part is that we wont let the people know that they’re making motionstrokes."

Grupp 6

"Since the WiiMote is so associated with playing games we have talked about doing something outside the box and really make something useful and interactive, that for example handicapped people can use for amusement or learning."

Grupp 7

"at last we found a cool piece of software called GlovePie. It enables interaction between the computer and the wiimote with very few lines of code. Unfortunately the software is for windows (and that sucks, because me hate window$) but that will do for now."

Grupp 8

"Yesterday, at app. 16 o’clock, we finally got our lego robot and today we have been brainstorming on what we want the robot to do. We’ve had many ideas and it eventually felt like as we could build something really cool.
Right now the boys are sitting down by the table and building the robot from scratch, just to be able to understand it fully and test it on what it can do."

Grupp 9

"Yesterday we took a field trip to the Stockholm Technical Museum. We were disappointed. The show looked like it hadnt been updated for at least ten or so years, and was very focused towards children. They did have a mind game, in which the two participants put on sweatband, wired to a table with a narrow plastic strip on it. A ball is placed in the middle of the strip, and the aim of the game is to get it to the opponents side. This is done by relaxation. The wired sweatband reads your “brain waves” (alpha and theta) and the lack of them pushes the ball away. highly overrated."

Internet City!

As part of their first two-week module "The Future Digital Industry", the Interactive Art Director students researched future trends of the digital industry.
The students have been working on future scenarios within areas such as productivity, e-commerce and entertainment. The module was developed and run by Great Works (LĎK), one of Swedens top digital agencies.

Read the students' future scenarios here:
The Mountain is Mohammed
Anything Anywhere
Pirates Will Triumph
The Facts are Fiction
Tightening the Fist on Open Handshakes
Productivity in New Media
eCommerce
eCommerce 2

Code-mod Workshop

The Digital Media students in Stockholm have been busy customizing code. Here is what they say:

On the 20th of september we were introduced to a workshop called Code-Mod. The main purpose with this workshop was to give us students a feel and understanding for programming in general. We were handed a task were each student would experiment with an already constructed game and from that change the code into something slightly different. The programming language used was processing and the original game was a basic breakout-clone. Most of us had no experience with object-oriented programming prior to the workshop.

Grand Opening Party at Hyper Island Stockholm

On the 4th of October 2007 Hyper Island will be celebrating it's opening of the facilities at Telefonplan. Come and see our new home in Stockholm, meet former and present students, watch their work and mingle with colleagues. Drinks and a light snack will be served - and a lot of interesting people will be
there.

The evening is arranged together with Swedish advertising weekly Resumé, as part of their Resumé Bar evenings. It’s editor-in-chief, Viggo Cavling, will conduct interviews with Hyper Island CEO Mattias Hansson and the world top creative Martin
Cedergren, of the interactive agency AKQA Amsterdam.

It all starts at 5 pm and ends at 8 pm in the evening.

Register now at the Resumé Bar site.

Lecture spotlight: Nick Marsh on service design

Nick Marsh is a service designer for Engine Service Design in London. This monday he held a work shop at Hyper Island in Stockholm for the Interactive Art Director program about service design. He is currently working with Nokia and airport company BAA helping them improve their services and their customers experience.

How does service design differ from traditional ways of thinking about interactive design?
- At Engine, we see service as the act of helping someone do something. This clearly covers a very broad set of activities and actions! It's this breadth that often challenges newcomers to service design. Service design uses similar user centred research tools, visualisation methods, prototyping and project management approaches to all the major modern design disciplines, including interaction design - but it also has some of its own unique approaches.
Service design often cut horizontally across established business units and practices, which means service designers need 'business design' skills too - and great relationships with senior figures in the client organisation.

Is this "the customer is always right" on steroids?
- Service design is very user and customer focused, which means we do spend a lot of time listening to and understanding customers. Mapping the various touchpoints where they encounter a brand is also a key activity, but that doesn't mean customers are always right! Understanding how to take customer insights, and translate them into new, exciting service designs that people want to buy and use is the challenge - If designer's just did what users and customers told them to the world would be a very boring - and badly designed! - place. I guess what I'm saying is that even in process driven, user centred practices like service design there's still a lot of room for designer's passion, insight and craft.

You have mentioned Apple as one company that take service design seriously. What do they do right in that area?
- Apple have a brilliant ability to combine complex product, service and marketing offers into very simple and beautiful objects - I suspect their focus and vision comes in a large part from their hyper active CEO. Apple's products are very vision driven, and you just can't get that type of focus without support and inspiration from the very top.

What other companies are taking service design seriously?
- Obviously, our clients do! Despite the bad press they've had this summer in the UK, I've found that BAA, the airports company, are very comfortable talking about and commissioning great service design. Perhaps this is because they always see what they do in terms of journeys? Orange are also service design pioneers, and they bankrolled several UK service design consultancies in the early years.

What kind of education and know-how are you looking for at Engine service design?
- We're always looking for new people. Everyone at Engine has a background in something other than service design, and I think the things we look for are quite abstract: A keen sense of process, a passion for thinking big with an ability to focus on the details. Good communication skills are vital.
- Perhaps the most important thing is to be comfortable with ambiguity, and being happy to let others 'design' the service for you. Being able to let go of your craft is very hard for a lot of designers, but to create great service designs you have to accept that your services are ultimately 'designed' by other people, over and over again every time they use or provide them. This, for me, is the most interesting, and rewarding part of what we do - helping other people help other people, the best they can. You can't really design anything more valuable than that can you?


Sebastian Suarez-Golborne

Hyper Island students join Lowe Brindfors trainee program

Swedish media industry magazine Dagens Media report that famous ad agency Lowe Brindfors has started its own trainee program – a first for the Swedish advertising sector according to Lowe Brindfors. Out of seventy applicants four were chosen for the program . Two of the four trainees come from studies at Hyper Island.
- We have accepted two trainees from Hyper Island. Their competence regarding digital media is very interesting as it is a growing market, says Håkan Engler at Lowe Brindfors.

David Lundgren and Elin Eriksson are the two Hyper Island students at the trainee program, which started last week.
- The first days have been hectic. The four of us have all begun on real projects from the get-go, says Elin Eriksson.

Håkan Engler at Lowe Brindfors claims that advertising schools alone cannot fill the demand for talent that the advertising business needs:
- Talent is the key for the successful advertising agencies. During the last years agencies have faced harder requirements, we have to be able to handle more kinds of media. We can’t count on the advertising schools to provide all the talent anymore.
- We want to attract talent. It goes without saying that the goal of the trainee program is to recruit all four of the trainees once the program is finished, says Engler.

Read the full story at Dagens Media (Swedish only).

First ever Digital Crayfish Party

We caught up with Patrick Gardner, one of the Perfect Fools who staged the Digital Crayfish Party at Restaurant J Gåshaga in Lidingö last weekend.

Who is Patrick Gardner, really?
- Just a working fool. I started out in digital at EF Education in Stockholm, where we were launching multimedia language labs in developing countries in 1994. One of our suppliers was Reference Interactive. I really liked their approach, which was unusual in those days - much more focused on the work and craftsmanship than world domination.
In 1998 I switched sides and went to work for them as a project leader and interactive scriptwriter. Towards the end of 1999 my current partner Tony Högqvist and I, along with several others, left Reference to start our own agency within A-Com: Houdini Digital Creations. Houdini lives on today, but eventually Tony and I decided we wanted to try our own wings in a fully independent agency.
On April 1, 2002, we joined forces with our old colleague from Reference, Tony Sajdak, to launch Perfect Fools. Today we have offices in Stockholm and New York, and our clients include companies like Samsung and AEG-Electrolux, as well as a long list of the world's top advertising agencies.

What is the Digital Crayfish Party?
- It's an attempt to get a small, informal and fun forum going for the Swedish digital industry.

But why do we need it?
- This is a great group of people - honestly quite admired around the world for their collective work. Up until now there hasn't been a small forum that brings leaders from these agencies together to share experiences in a relaxed and informal environment. We have Guldägget and other parties - but they're not quite the same thing.
We can learn a lot from each other, and have more to gain than lose by being open. This seemed to us like the right opportunity to create a setting where that can happen.

Will it be back?
- Yes! We are already talking about getting year two rolling. My hope is to attract other agencies into the organizing process - so it can be an even better event next year and feel like something the whole industry owns, rather than something just put out there by one group.

Who can attend?
- The event is primarily for Presidents, managing directors and creative directors. Within traditional agencies who work a lot with digital we generally invited their top digital people. And then there are a number of folks with unique and long-standing profiles within the industry who were there as well. So it's a mix but the focus is on people who are setting the tone within digital.

What is the next big digital thing to happen?
- The 2nd annual Digital Crayfish Party - at the end of the summer 2008!

Hyper Island on stage

Hyper Island is soon on a stage near you. Listen to Hyper Island CEO Mattias Hansson as he speaks October the 23th at http://www.mediaevolution.se/ and/or listen to Mattias as he leads the discussion about One Minute Media at http://www.kristallen.tv/seminarium07?f=64 in Stockholm the 17th to 18th of September.

The new picture of China

This is pictures from the creative ad agency DMG in China, Beijing office. Read interview below.

Beijing calling Hyper Island

This summer we got a call from one of the most interesting new global markets. The agency DMG in China needed Hyper Island students for internships. We said as we always do: “You better come over and lecture and at the same time introduce yourself to the students”. Maybe they will. But first we sent our new CEO Mattias Hansson to Beijing to interview Sebastian Adam at the DMG head quarters in Beijing.

QSebastian who are you, really?
A: I am the latest European advertising expat to be lured to one of the most exciting countries in the world – and to one of the hottest communications companies in the Tiger economy.


Q: Tell us about the company you work for right now and what you are doing there?
A: ….I was up and ready for a new challenge after working five years for one of Europe’s creative advertising hot shop’s. I needed new horizons, inspiration and culture. I felt the travel bug bite me and I wanted to return home with a bag full of new experiences.
I booked a ticket and three days later I was standing in the airport of China’s capitol (Beijing) with only a few names and telephone numbers for a bunch of advertising guru’s in my pocket.
I had read an article in FastCompany about Dan Mintz at DMG so I called him. Have a look if you have a sec: http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/104/open_mintz.html. DMG is an international independent full service advertising & communication agency that specializes in the greater China region.
Luckily they just had an expatriate position available and brought me on board. Ever since I am working very closely with DMG’s management, assisting and overseeing international accounts such as Volkswagen, Fruit of the Loom, Nike and Johnson & Johnson and doing business development.
DMG has five offices. The two major one’s in Beijing and Shanghai. Our vision is to be greater China’s premier integrated advertising agency using cross-cultural strategically driven creative and to be a major force in our clients success on a brand, product and business level.

Q: How do you come across Hyper Island? And what differ DMG from working in the western advertising world?
A:The other day I was looking for some senior people to create and execute a complex website for one of our US clients. A friend and colleague of mine mentioned some former Hyperisland guy’s.
China is on the verge of a major digital explosion and we want to harness the world’s best talent to deliver the best creative digital communications.
We are considering opening a DMG Digital Centre of Excellence – a place that becomes a focal point for digital talent. We hope to offer young digital talents the opportunity gain some experience here in China . We have some great opportunities for the hottest talent to work on great Nike or Volkswagen campaigns.
A little while ago we had some young creative talents from Europe. Those “Miami-Ad-School”-students were working at our Beijing office to further their education, on a professional and personal level. Career development, especially in the field of design and advertising, requires strong creative thinkers to be able to step out of the box and master a strange and challenging situation.
The young creatives also liked DMG because it is not like network agencies that take foreign ideas and simply re-purpose them for a Chinese audience. When an agency does this, they fail to engage with Chinese people. Instead, DMG uses international standards and applies them to Chinese culture, philosophy and innovative ideas. We develop visuals that apply to local market. In a country where the advertising standards would have a novice cringe, Dan Mintz has pulled together a solid team of designers and enabled them to unleash their creativity in a cultural context .
Our visiting students have the opportunity to learn new ways of communication, which teaches them not only patience, but also better teamwork and new ways of expression.
China is more cosmopolitan than many people imagine. That’s what truly makes Beijing interesting for me, you can meet someone from Tasmania, Holland, Russia, Nigeria, England, China, and Sverige, all in a single evening! While Beijing is definitely in China, its not so far out of the comfort zone .
China is a hot economic and cultural property, but you can't just come into Beijing as a foreigner and jump right in like some blue chip international brands have tried. Many have been burned. Here at DMG we not only manage to maintain international standards, but to set the bar even higher, all because it works with the Chinese mindset and takes it to a new level creatively. So while our interns were definitely not in for an easy ride, it was certainly an exciting and rewarding one.

Q: Why do you think Hyper Island students can make a difference in China?
A: HyperIsland’s white hot digital talent brings knowledge and experience. We harness that to our creative discipline and understanding of the Chinese market could help to reach out to the new breed of logged on Chinese consumer. Listening to Mattias Hansson here in Beijing I am more than positive that Hyperisland students can help to spin the wheel!

Q: Whats’s the biggest socio-cultural differencies between west and east?
A: I figured out for myself that Chinese people and culture (the east) is about respecting each other and to keep everybody happy. No one wants to lose face over here. Problems or sensitive topics are often addressed in an indirect way while Europeans pretty much speak out loud and address hot topics in a more direct way. Of course also respecting each other but the Chinese do a little chicken dance around it. Sometimes not very easy I feel.

Q: What’s your weirdest expat-moment in China?
A: Wow! My weirdest expat-moment? I guess it was the first morning I woke up in China (Beijing ) I looked out of my hotel room and saw the forbidden city. It was weired and bizarre because I have been on a small Spanish island just few days earlier drinking red wine with my Spanish friends. From tapas to chicken’s feet in 24 hours was quite a headspin.
Thanks for the interview. Personally I hope to welcome you in Beijing in the near future and who knows. Maybe Hyperisland will soon open it’s doors here in China?!
Tack så mycket. Hej då!
Sebastian Adam, DMG Beijing
sebastian.adam@dmgmedia.com