Digital Creativity at the Hyper Island Lab

Last week, I went to a Hyper Island Lab Session on Creativity in Digital. It was very useful, I got a lot out of it and I met some great people.

Some of you know that although I work in an advertising agency, I’m also doing a Masters (MSc) in Digital Marketing Communications. This course helps with the assignment we are currently working on (Work Based Learning) and I want to share my notes with the other people on the Masters course. So…here they are!

The Masterclass was a one-day creative session using the digital network as a springboard for creative ideas, new business opportunities and product development. They also got a bit clever with us… they ran our session in Leeds simultaneously with a session in Manchester and kept us connected all day with a big screen and video conferencing, provided by NorthernNet.

The Leeds session was run by Henrik Johansson, who studied creative leadership at The Kaospilots in Denmark and his passion is to help groups solve tricky tasks and become smarter together (incidentally, Henrik wore his trousers tucked into some seriously expensive Prada boots!).

So, what did we do?

We started off the day with a group task - Leeds v Manchester. We took turns to draw an apple on a flip chart. Someone from Leeds went first, followed by someone from Manchester. The catch was that we couldn’t draw the same thing twice.  

We then used reflective learning principles to review the task.

What happened?

We started off by drawing very literal apples…we then moved on to drawing parts of apples…and then on to associations (e.g. apple sauce, apple juice).

What did I learn?

• I’m quite literal and sometimes I need others to make me expand my thinking - I can be a bit of a ‘lone worker’ and I don’t consider myself to be very creative within a work context
• I can’t draw! (which stopped me doing a few complicated ones)
• Some people held back because of the feeling they needed to perform
• A word can have a lot of different meanings and associations
• An apple to me, may mean something completely different to others (perception).
• Lots of us were on the same wavelength

How can I apply this?

• Remember that my perception isn’t the only one
• Try to work in groups more, than always trying to come up with solutions on my own
• Always get rid of the obvious ideas first, it then makes us think of the broader ideas

We then had a talk from Professor Jonathan Briggs. He is one of the founders of Hyper Island, is Professor of Ecommerce at Kingston University in London and also heads up The OTHER Media Agency (who work with Paul Smith, Jasper Conran, BAFTA and more). What a busy man!

He talked to us about the current digital landscape and what he thinks is coming next.

Important points for the next year included:

• Personal (e.g.behavioural targeting)
• Mobile (most devices going mobile)
• Social (obv.)
• Semantic (meaning)
• Augmented (blending the physical and virtual worlds)
• Touch (the mouse is dead, long live touch, pens etc.)
• eCommerce (creativity + planned user experience = ROI)
• Location (it matters where I am for context)
• Achievements (linking points to tasks, e.g. Four Square)
• Rich Media (using a blend of media)

We then broke for lunch and pretty much leaped on Jonathan to have a go with his new iPad! I’m not an Apple lover at all, but it is lovely. Very slick and fast.



The second half of the day looked at Idea development. Ideas can come out of the blue, or they can come out of a structured process:



This process shifts between divergent and convergent thinking, separates creative and analytics thinking and also believes that quantity is a condition that is needed for quality.

We then split into groups to work on a brief. My group looked at “how can we use high speed broadband and hand held devices to increase creative collaboration in educational settings?”

The following photo looks at my group in Leeds through the video conferencing in Manchester

This started off with us writing down as many ideas as we could think of very quickly onto post-it notes, in silence. The aim of this was to get out all the obvious ideas. We then moved onto associations. Every 2 mins, we were given a random (and I do mean random!) picture that we needed to relate to the brief. This sparked off some more ideas. We then looked at pairing ideas - choosing two ideas at random and trying to put them together.

We then grouped these ideas into themes and discussed them further.

Ben Dalton from our group (thank you Ben, you were great!) presented our rough ideas to the rest of the Leeds group and to Manchester. All the groups did this and we also critiqued each group’s ideas and made suggestions for improvement.

…and again, we went back into groups to refine the ideas and presented back to everyone.

Learnings and Insights

• it’s good to think ‘wacky’ sometimes
• don’t get hung up about the quality of the ideas, with quantity, they will come
• association, even with seemingly random things, can really help
• a team is better than one person
• the pressure to perform can sometimes hinder ideas
• building on all ideas, even the ones that feel very weak at the start, can results in some great ideas
• people with different experiences and jobs make a good team

…it’s also interesting how we did all come up with similar ideas. Although some of us had quite different jobs, they weren’t actually that different. It wasn’t a co-incidence that most of us went with ideas that related to geolocation and augmented reality. We are affected with the media that surrounds us in our industry.

Recommendations to myself to improve creative teamwork and idea development

• consider doing ‘energisers’ at the start - pref. wacky ones! they make people laugh and get rid of the thoughts in our heads already
• think of ways to make briefs as un-restrictive as possible - if we can’t do this…start with no restrictions and then take elements of the ‘unrealistic’ ideas that were generated
• write everything down - pref. someone with good handwriting and who is well organised!
• consider splitting teams in two to foster that competitive element

I’m usually a pretty good reflector. What I’m not so good at sometimes is being an ‘activist’ (that’s for the MSc students!) - this means I find it harder to put my reflections into action. I enjoyed doing the random associations, but am still not sure how to put this into practise at work.

I was very tired by the end of the day, but really enjoyed the process. It’s not something I’d normally do and took me out of my comfort zone…which I thoroughly enjoyed. Thank you Hyper Island and thank you to my course mates!

Photos: taken on my HTC Touch Pro 2, by Sara Silfverberg and by Paul Fidler