There is a gap between what education and industry needs, the Hyper Island’s Master of Arts, Digital Experience Design program was created to understand what we need to build products, services, and systems within the industry. Hyper Island is a world-leading educator in the fields of digital and interactive communication, business transformation and leadership. It has been hailed as the 'Digital Harvard' and listed by CNN as one of the most innovative schools in the world.
Following work is non-commercial and shared as a reflection on the journey.
Delete Manchester
At the design thinking module at Hyper Island, we received the brief from CityCo Manchester to design a support tool for the Night-Time Economy. We went through the design thinking process and identified the brief is focussed on the effect, and not the cause. In our primary and secondary research, we found that people were not ready to take ownership to make a change in the city, and all existing “reporting” tools were moving one problem to another. We recognised that people simply don’t care about the city.
We started to question a problem and as a result, redefined the brief. To resolve the problem, we proposed a campaign to start an experiment in social cohesion and attempted to temporarily “Delete Manchester” from Google Maps.
Why? Simply because we don’t appreciate what we have until it’s gone… and sometimes we have to lose something priceless to understand the value of it. This disruptive idea was created to give ownership back to people, to form a stronger bond between people and the city, to remind people that they are the city, and to unite people without a need of crises. The idea was presented to CityCo and was highly appreciated.
EY
In Business transformation module at Hyper Island (Manchester), we tackled a very arduous brief to transform the EY’s business model to make it sustainable in the future.
We used a range of research methods and tools to investigate the perception of EY, and relationship with consultancy in general.
In the primary research, we spoke to a Chief Experience Officer at PwC experience centre in Amsterdam, to Talent Enablement Leader, in EY EMEA, to the Research Director Cyber-Physical Systems at CSIRO’s Data61, Australia and Digital Transformation & Automation at Nike EHQ. In secondary research, we critically evaluated cutting-edge thinking related to business strategy, digital business transformation and new business models from academic and professional sources.
From this, we gained a substantial amount of observations and insights, and by synthesising all data, we found the most impactful perceptions and problems of EY. From here we build a video proposal which speaks on behalf of AI travelling from the future.
App for emotional awareness
At Hyper Island (UK) we got a brief to improve a client and agency relationship, by creating a tool that can help a start-up agency in Switzerland to be more human-centric working with the clients.
Our goal was not to facilitate the service of delivery and sale but to improve the client-agency relationship in general by finding and connecting both user groups through empathy.
The insight led the team to our opportunity area: how might we apply emotional intelligence to improve the client-agency relationship in the context of a project team?
We developed an application called Bonobo, because bonobos are the most empathetic animals in the animal kingdom. The name itself emphasises that empathy is a uniquely human trait, rooted in core DNA of every one of us.
This tool enables clients and the agency to create a safe environment to share emotions, to make emotions visible and trackable, to be able to recognise how emotions impact a project team performance, to act on it.
The agency owns this app, and the owner holds the responsibility to set up projects between client and agency teams.
The app will be first introduced at a workshop at the beginning of the project, where the team will consider how to use it, explaining tools that benefit the project.