Creative people

All this effort, trying to think outside the box. Trying to be unique, go where no one has gone before. It seems all our lecturers are trying to tell us that the simpler the idea is, the better it is. But of course thinking inside the box would be the simplest solution? Can you tell I am tired yet?

I'd like to quote one of my favourite authors here;

I'll be more enthusiastic about encouraging thinking outside the box when there's evidence of any thinking going on inside it.

- Terry Pratchett

Wrapping up and new beginning

I have been bad at updating. As usual this has nothing to do with me having nothing to write and everything to do with the fact that a lot of things is going on and I don’t have the time to write about it.

Last week we made our pitch for the bank and the investors. It was more fun than expected, I felt so proud when we could actually answer all their questions. We almost got a thumbs up, they didn’t like that we had so many employees so they wanted us to limit our market so that we could cut down on them and by doing that, on costs. Of course.

It felt really good. Our prognosis on how much money we will make is a bit optimistic, but according to that we could all be millionaires in three years. Should we go through with it?

Now we have a new module; Visual Communication. The lecturers so far have been great, both entertaining and enlightening. Today we had a French guy by the name of Stevens Henri and his accent alone made his lecture worth attending. He went through the basic shapes and colours with us, a lecture that could have made us all fall asleep, we have all heard most of it before. Except we didn’t, that’s how good he was. Then he gave us brushes and paint and had us painting the entire afternoon. Can’t say I produced anything worth sowing to anyone at all, ever, but I have a feeling that wasn’t the point.

Autums are great for walks, walks are great for thinking

New module, this time we will explore the possibility of earning embarrassingly large amounts of cash by finding and filling a need. New business idea time! I have a new group as well, Jocke (the captain), Tilde (doc), Isak (ship drunk) and Peter (we don’t know what he is yet). The most social group so far, we seem to spend a lot of time in cafés and last week we had dinner at my place. The social thing is important to me after the last module where I sort of fell in between groups so I have been pushing hard for the weekly dinners. The others have been pushing for the constant tea and coffee breaks, so we are all good.

I have been thinking a lot about branding these past days. Not so strange perhaps considering the module, I guess I get no points for creativity by Teo Härén (we had a seminar with him via videolink two weeks ago).
But whatever, I am thinking about it. So much that I went to the library and picked up “No Logo” by Naomi Klein, I haven’t started reading it yet but I am looking forward to it.

I love the library here, the way they actually have the books I want standing patiently waiting for me on the shelves… In Lund, a city full of students who haven’t given up on books the way these digital media students have, the books I wanted were never in. Here I seem to be the only one visiting the library, which is both sad and practical.

But back on track, I haven’t come to anything that might be considered a conclusion with my thinking so far, but I do have a video for you guys. Microsoft made it, probably to get management to stop butting in on all their good ideas…

Frustration land

There is frustration in the air, it has been there all week and it is slowly driving me mad. Nothing works, if feels like all I do is wait. I can’t go anywhere cause something might happen, I might be needed, I can’t let these people down. We have so much to do, but we never seem to have all the components to actually be able to do it. It is so frustrating and so maddening.

We finally got a Printfabriken as a sponsor for our print yesterday. A huge relief I tell you, we had just about decided to just print everything here at school and were all very depressed when they called me back. But now everything is jammed again (of course) because there is no communication. Not one that works anyways. Not between us, the press group, and the design group; responsible for the poster design, and not between us and the teachers; who are away in Stockholm and has to clear everything before we go to print.

Now I am going to get the press release done at least, although I have no great pictures to put in it, not even after both mailing everyone about it, and asking around. But then my mail have been bouncing mails for some reason, so a lot of mail have probably been lost.

I am not in a happy place right now.

End and new beginning

We had our presentation today; it went rather well I think. I think all the groups did a great job, everyone has really gotten better at presentations, better rehearsed, better PowerPoint presentations, more structure. The feedback afterwards still needs working on though. We also got our new assignment, to make an interactive exhibition with sound and light. None of us know anything about the technique so right now it feels a bit hopeless to be honest. We will also set up a group blog that I will link later, a magazine and a lot of organisation…

Today I put up some inspirational links on this blog, this if from one of them, Peter Callesen, a great paper artist.

Baby Steps

We are pretty calm over at Hyper at the moment, presentations tomorrow but this assignment was only a worm-up really so everyone is taking it easy.

We had a lecture today; Mattias Nygren and Magnus Giritzlehner from GamePort. It was fun to talk to people from the gaming industry, which I find rather interesting. They showed us movies from a game called The City of Metronome (which, by the way is the first google suggestion when you have typed “the city of m”), and it is wonderful. This is not the best trailer, but the only one available on the web at the moment. God, I hope they will get the funding to really make it one day.





In group news we have actually rehearsed and timed this presentation. That is a first. We are taking baby steps towards perfection.

Experience Technology

New module this week. Today Jonas Stangel visited us, a product designer that introduced us to the art of designing objects, real things, not just design on a screen but toasters and drills as well. It was fun and interesting, it is always exciting to see design of products that never reached or have yet to reach the market. Or just look more closely at the design that did make it, but whose geniality you never really considered. Got some nice tips about the thought process and some inspiration about what to do with our current object designs.

This is a Ford Concept Car he showed us, designed by Mark Newson. If I could drive and had the money, I would buy it just because of the trunk.