Hyper Island – the aftermath

After such a full and productive day at the Hyper Island Lab that I talked about in a previous post, I thought I should summarize the main points and thoughts of the day. Of course this being the Internet – I don’t have to!

Head on over to the brilliant blog of Ally Manock who has written a great account of what exactly happened in this one day session and how we all managed to get to grips with this system. (image left, from Ally’s site, was a bit of a highlight when Jonathan Briggs took out his iPad *swoons*)

CHALLENGE: Could I run a Mini Hyper Island for my own groups of students

I did a mini Hyper Island today with my students and I wasn’t sure how it would go. They are a small group, only 12 of them and though they knew each other well, this can often make it more difficult to relax when suddenly you are all working as a group. I had told some other tutors that in my session today I would be getting my students to dance, shout, look into each others eyes and share ideas. Most of them looked at me like maybe this would not go so well, especially the dancing part…

THE CONDITIONS

This is a group of first / second year Creative Digital Communications Degree students, a range of ages and abilities. The room is a mac suite that has a large table in the center of the room so divides the space into two sections of small open area. There is also a projector at the front and a sound system.

THE SETUP

I set up the session so that they would know that what we would be doing was about creativity, and idea generation so they would get out of it what they put into it. (this is something the HI trainers had said to us on a few occasions). I also said let’s all just be open minded, and up for this and have fun with it.

THE PREPARATION

I had with me a clean white board and several markers and wipes. Also had music ready, chosen before hand from one of the students. I thought the best way to set this up would be to get them up and moving. They all stood up – and I got them to push in their chairs. This already is very different from our typical class, though we are very relaxed they are almost entirely looking at their screens the whole session.

THE ACTIVITIES

I then had them to do a First Exercise: Shout

All stand in a circle, heads down, eyes looking at the floor, and they would count 1, 2, 3 then look up and at someone direct in the eye. If they did actually both look at each other, they would scream and jump out of the circle. If not it would continue until everyone had caught someone’s direct gaze at some point.

RESULT: They started a bit shy, and very quiet. Years of being told to keep the noise down in a computer lab and suddenly I was asking them to make some noise, well, no one actually did a proper scream but they did eventually count to 3 loud enough so I could hear them. The goal was that it would loosen tensions a little bit and get them to be a bit more relaxed and open to ideas…

Second Exercise: Dance

They would all walk around the room, only one initially strayed from ‘the comfort zone‘ where everyone was but did ask me permission if he could first…  this was used to form random groups. I asked them to stop and they had to choose the 2 nearest people to them so that they would form a group of 3 people.

Each person then chose to be either an Apple, Giraffe or a Book.

*Cue Music* when the music plays the person who I called, so “Apple” would have to dance and the other two would copy them. This would repeat so each person had a try or more than one try, to really boost energy and laughs….

RESULT:

This went far far better than I imagined it would, I thought they would possibly refuse, but as soon as the music went on, they seemed to enjoy it a lot. The amount that they actually danced and lead the others in their team was fantastic and I think this was very successful.

We then moved onto a different type of exercise, one where they drew ‘apple’, again from the Hyper Island Lab. I got them into two groups to start with…

Third Exercise: APPLE

I gave them the challenge of drawing on the whiteboard, Apple.

That was the only restriction that I placed onto them, that it would be one groups turn then to swap to the other. I gave them around ten minutes before stopping the activity.

RESULT:

This was a little unexpected. They put rules onto themselves. Each person had a ‘go’ one after the other in order of who was standing where and when each person had drawn an apple, they said ok all finished… I asked them who said it was in order and you were having on try each and they realised that it was a restriction they immediately assumed.

We had a discussion about what happened, and I was impressed with their understanding and interpretation of the event. They got to realise that actually the first few ideas are ideas most people will have and only by keeping thinking then they truly got to the more unique and original ideas- i.e a candy apple was drawn by this point! We had a discussion about how many times are they working towards a product, or a site, or a film, and they have an idea ‘the idea’ and then they stop, they work on that first idea… not even realising that they could have had more than one idea! It’s a really great moment and I hope they keep to that thinking as they finish their year. Really successful and enjoyable.

Fourth Exercise: Plan a Party

This was interesting, I asked them to plan a party (from HI again) and where I was expecting more mundane answers they really seemed to be in a creative mood now, and gad started to give me some interesting answers. The second part to this challenge was then that they have £40 Million to plan the best party in the whole of Yorkshire, that will be written about in history books… and the answers are far more creative, illustrating that again we all put limits on our thinking to start with.

RESULT:

Well as I mentioned above, they were really into thinking out of the box by this point, more than I anticipated and they had started to come out with amazing ideas from the start! We then discussed how if you set yourself a low target, lots of constraints that actually that’s all you will reach, and how immediately if you give yourself a huge area to aspire to then you can have much more interesting ideas, sure we couldn’t have the biggest fireworks display, but we could have a small one, and maybe we couldn’t have a swimming pool filled with jelly, but we could fill a tub… You don’t want to know their other ideas!

Fifth Exercise: Tell a story

This was a case of standing face to face and one person starts to tell a story, I say switch, after only a few seconds and the other person continues….

RESULT:

This resulted in some fantastic interesting creative stories that would just never have gotten written without collaboration, and that was the whole point. To illustrate that you may have a pretty good idea, but once you open up and discuss it with others, you can get to an incredible point in the development of that idea. It also leads to looking at body language, the laughing and speed at telling your story and being as creative as possible was magical to watch.

THE CONCLUSION

What was interesting was they took it on board and really went for it, and had a blast doing it. Later I had to leave them to get on with their projects, and they did a group brainstorm (I told them about negative brainstorming) together using the whiteboard all by their own initiative. This had not happened before. It got them to think in other ways and to realize that actually they could be creative even if they didn’t think they were.

Brilliant, and wish me luck tomorrow – I’ll be doing it tomorrow with my shyest, quietest, most reserved group! They won’t know what hit them

Do you have any exercises that you try to get your students to be creative? Or are there any exercises you use for idea generation?

(dance photo shout credit)