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

Hyper Island was founded to produce CD Roms

Today we had a lecture with David Erixon, he is one of the three founders of Hyper Island. He is also the brand strategy director of Vodafone. He talked about the upcoming global brand relaunch of Vodafone. It was fascinating to go through the whole case study, from previous 'fuck ups', to research stage, to insights, to new strategy all the way into integration of the new direction. So after googling David I found this interview of him, with the reasons he founded Hyper Island in the first place with two others.



Found on Knitwareblog

Hyper Island on tour

Facilitators and students will be traveling around in the next few months to represent the school in 8 major cities around the globe: Amsterdam, Barcelona, Berlin, London, New York, Oslo, Stockholm & Sao Paolo. It's a chance for interested people to learn more about Hyper Island and to apply for a course here at the same time. It's Hyper Island choosing students, and students choosing Hyper Island.

There will be 100 seats for international students between the five programs for next year. If you want the chance for one of them, check out the recruitment website. If you have any questions regarding the dates in November & January for London, send me an email to waldemar.wegelin (at) hyperisland.se or leave a comment here.

5 criteria for my dream job

What do I want from a job? Inspired by this post.

1. I want a job at a place where everyone commits to doing their best and most creative work.
2. I want a job where I can work with like-minded people who I can learn and get inspired from.
3. I want a job that gives me the opportunity to use the tools that I've learned in the past years.
4. I want a job where I will be constantly challenged and have the chance to fail and grow.
5. I want a job without restrictions to media for my work and creativity.
   

The people of IAD10

These are the photos of yesterdays shoot for the Interactive art director 10 part of the Hyper Island website. Photographer: Azin His photobitch: Lasse

Focahontas by Anna Wegelin

My sister Anna just released her first accessory line 'Focahontas' together with photos of them on a model. See them below and pay her little online store a visit: http://annawegelin.bigcartel.com

Lipton competition interview

We (Robbin, Nathan & me) went to Paris last week to present our idea and work in front of the Tribal DDB team and Garth Woolley, the global brand manager of Lipton.

Here's an interview from the Hyper Island blog about it:

How did you end up working together?
We (Robbin & Waldemar) worked together in a previous school project. We enjoyed that, so when we got the brief from Tribal DDB and Lipton it felt natural to continue with our collaboration. Nathan joined in as the missing piece and our group was formed.

How come you submitted to the contest in the first place?
The brief arrived immediately after our second module where our very inspiring project leader Henrik (kudos!) armed us with tools for generating and developing ideas. This challenge looked like a perfect opportunity to practice and use those toy on our own. And obviously we were excited about having the chance for a trip to Paris.

What was the brief about?
It was about finding a solution that would connect Lipton Ice Tea and their message "Drink Positive" with its audience. The criteria was that it would have to be innovative; something that simply could not have been possibly five years ago.

What's your concept about?
We call it the "Smile Experiment", basically it's about bringing the Lipton Ice Tea message to life and connecting it to Lipton's target audience in a really cool way. Think emotional browsing... for the moment though we can't give away too much information because we're Tribal DDB and Lipton are looking for a way to produce our idea.

What if you win?
We did win! We went to Paris thursday morning and presented to the client, Tribal DDB and a bunch of other people visiting the Digital Days. The client loved it and we've received nothing but praise from everyone involved. Bringing our idea to life will initially mean a lot of planning and testing on behalf of Lipton and Tribal DDB. For us, this means that we not only won a competition and a piece for our portfolio – but also a chance to get our idea produced. Maybe even more trips to Paris or London, fingers crossed.

Any new learnings?
Lots! First of all about the work progress and the great value of having tools and structure for generating ideas. Secondly that don't settle for an idea before you get that special butterfly feeling in your stomach. We generated a couple of hundred ideas, lots of bad ones and about three "good enough" and in the end this one that filled our criterias of being both great and innovative. For the presentation we created a case movie. Despite of being a bit persuasive the movie also made us think ahead and plan exactly what we we're gonna say to whom. We ended up rewriting the script a couple of times and each time made the idea and our common understanding of the possibilities even greater.

Feature dreams, where would you like to end up?
Answering this questions while sipping a cappuccino next to the impressive Notre Dame, it's tempting to say Paris. But honestly, time will tell. It's not so much about a certain place in the world as about finding a nice atmosphere with values focused on creating idea driven work. Nathan is excited about Japan as a place to work, we are still spinning the globe.

Congratulations also to the following students whose projects made it to the final stages of the contest: Azin Ashourvan, Gro Larsson, Lasse Korsgaard, Jon Eskilsson, Minna Johans, Magnus Karlsson, Alexander Kristensen