CKSK Hyper Island Master Class – 3 Days in Hyperspace : )

Award-winning digital agency, CKSK, invited Hyper Island to Dublin for an amazing 3day Master Class. This was the first ever Hyper Island Master Class event in Ireland, and it consisted of 3 intense days of advanced professional training.

What Hyper Island is has been best summarized in this Hyper Island In a Nutshell video (created by  students from Hyper Island Digital Media class of 2010, Stockholm).

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I had the pleasure of attending this Master Class, and I joined a mixture of agency and client side professionals in the Lost Society. We were ready to be challenged, inspired,  and  gain new insights into digital communications and marketing.

The Class kicked off with creating a set of guidelines that would make everyone comfortable with the unusual learning process. Just a sample few:
*there are no stupid questions
*step out of your comfort zone, it’s the only way you will learn something new
* you only fail if you do not learn from your mistakes
*confidentiality – what happens in Sweden stays in Sweden (with the Swedish music and Swedish sweets we were reminded to keep things in Sweden throughout the class) so anything about the course and speakers can be shared but not information about the classmates.

What followed was a perfectly balanced mixture of presentations from speakers – Mark Comerford, Daniele Fiandaca and David Erixon (one of the founders of Hyper Island) , creative tasks, preparing a brief and finally an action plan – a solid, clear list of deliverables and deadlines that was shared in groups.

Mark Comeford talked to us about change – the way networks are becoming the basic units of communication, how websites are no longer places we go to but rather are places we are sent to, and the fact that to understand the new models of communication we need to experience them, not just know about them.
Mark has made a perfect point with his swimming lesson example – even though he told us what exactly we should do not to drown, we still need a dip in the water to actually learn to swim.

Daniele Fiandaca demystified the newest trends in the industry – location, gamification, two screen, RFIDs, cultural artifacts, social mash-ups and gave us some tips on rewiring our brains to stay relevant in the ever changing digital world. We might have not succeeded in creating a revolutionary app in our mash-up task, and our predictions for the big thing in 2014 might have not been very accurate (seriously, I do not see cyborgs getting popular so soon), but we all seeemed to start seeing the digital trends in a new light.

David Erixon made us all aware of how many opportunities await if only we take into account the full customer cycle and focus on the consumer’s experience with our product, not the product itself. He renamed the traditional marketing value chain a “cost chain”, as marketers are on the side that only creates costs. He then made us realize the real value happens in the customer space, it is the integrated experience that we should be after, shaping expectations and doing things that change the rules in the market with and for customers. Finally, we were told to stop  doing what traditional marketing is all about -putting lipstick on the pig, and just make the pig better

The presentations and creative tasks were always combined with time for reflection – on what we did, how we did it and what we could change. That particular part of the Master Class  was very difficult to understand untill we actually reflected, shared in groups and were left with some valuable insights. It was like with Mark’s swimming lesson – you just have to try it to really get what it is all about.

To sum up I have to say that the Hyper Island Master Class was an exceptionally good, unique learning experience  – it is a breath of fresh air in the old fashioned education system of the new digital communications era.

Karolina Martyniak – Prosperity.ie