#10 The Hyper Island Designer
Meet Jesper Bröring. Jesper is a designer at Method and is an alumni of Hyper Island Manchester. I'm delighted to announce Jesper is the Industry Leader for our Experience Design Exploration Project. Here's what he has to say... What’s the biggest lesson you’ve learnt over the last year? Last year Method needed an interaction designer on a project in the New York studio. And I said that I’d love to go there for a while and so there I was on the plane from London to New York. I had never been and on the first day when I was walking to the office, I felt like I was walking to a new job. This obviously wasn’t the case, because I was just going to the NY office of Method and I had also already met a couple of my colleagues there before in London.
My biggest learning came from working with the team there. The ways of working in the offices are slightly different but on the project team we collaborated and changed the process where needed. The direct team was close to each other and we built up some great momentum and a great culture in a short amount of time. We all worked towards the same goal and I think that is where great work comes from.
What’s your burning question of the moment? That would probably something like: What is the right balance of in-house and agency design teams? Sometimes I find it hard to be a partner because I think design is such an important thing within companies right now. If you look at the most successful companies at this moment then you will see that a lot of those are design led. Hence the question, what is the right balance?
What’s the most inspiring thing you’ve seen/ heard/ read in the last year? The podcast called StartUp by Gimlet Media. I am absolutely in love with it. It’s a podcast that you should start from episode 1 because it is a story of the creation of a company.
Alex Blumberg, who is the CEO of this company, is a great storyteller and on top of that in the podcast he is very open and assumes you don’t know anything. He sometimes doesn’t either. The podcast is very honest and has some great parts in it. It’s great to see how Alex works around problems and that is exactly why I find it inspiring.
What would be your one piece of advice to students on Hyper Island’s new MA in Digital Experience Design? I actually think students at Hyper Island don’t need a lot of advice so I’ll give very practical advice. As an Hyper Island Manchester alumni, I would say try to live with a couple of other students. And also preferably nearby other students. This is because the other students are in the same boat, on the same journey. They haven’t done Hyper Island before, might have moved countries and probably don’t know anyone else in Manchester. It sounds cheesy, but during Hyper Island you’ll create some new great friendships that will last a lifetime. And to add to this, I think that the power of Hyper Island is that you learn the most from each other. So living together or nearby is a great start of that.