7 things for DMM7

Before it all disappears I thought I’d write some notes to next year’s students.

I’m three weeks out of the taught part of an MA at Hyper Island and the world seems very real, into which you can read whatever you like — Hyper is a bubble, but a pleasant and democratic and affable one that you could comfortably live inside for a long while.

I thought I’d write a couple of pieces of advice for the coming intake of students of Digital Media Management. Hyper seem acutely aware of the importance of changing practice after receiving feedback, so not all of these will be applicable next year, but I hope some of them are still useful.

Owing to my lack of experience in agency and digital culture (having been in non-profits and illicit academia for my working life), perhaps these are immediately obvious to some of you. They weren’t for me.

1. Learn how to use metaphor well.
   One of the key words for the early section of the course was ‘storytelling’ — the ability to create a coherent, affecting narrative for whatever idea you’d come up with. This is definitely important, but it’s also only the last step in the process and, while it might convince someone to pay you for something, it’s not a guarantee that the thing itself will be any good.
   What could do that, at the same time as improving your communication, is metaphor. You’re going to be communicating with people from two-dozen different cultures, with different working backgrounds, of different ages and frames of social reference — communicating well is finding what resonates and using that to get more complex ideas across.
2. Learn how to set a good culture.
   This is so vital some of my friends from DMM6 and I have started Northern Quarter, a culture design agency. I don’t doubt that even with the most authoritarian and dictatorial “leadership” directing people in your group you can create something valuable, but you can achieve so much more, and much more quickly, working towards something you’ve collectively agreed is important, with realistic expectations of one another, and understanding the needs of your team-mates.
3. Learn to appreciate the unpredictability of your colleagues.
   Sometimes, a few months in, you will yearn for a group where everyone just does as you say. Then it will happen, and it will feel terrible, and you’ll be crushed under the weight of your own self-expectation. You’ll begin to understand that you don’t have all the answers, and that in fact nobody does, but you’re far closer to those answers when you’re working with other people than at any other time.
4. Learn to internalise what everyone else is saying about you.
   I still can’t do this, but that’s as much a psychiatric concern as anything else. A lot of people have come from backgrounds where you have to have a “thick skin” to feedback, because it is undertaken in bad faith. Hyper is different, because people genuinely want to see how they can better themselves and help you become a person you want to be. That can’t happen if you’re wearing the same world-weary cynical armour you had to wear at your last job.
5. Learn things that aren’t directly applicable to your ‘career’.
   Probably you’ve come to Hyper, like many others, with an ideal job title in your mind — Product Designer, Data Scientist, Service Designer, etc. Maybe you want to start your own company. There are going to be sections of the course that won’t be applicable to the stuff you think you want to do later; these, ironically, are probably where you will learn the most. Perhaps not because the topic is inherently fascinating, or because of any revelatory epiphany owing to a TED talk, but because in reading and researching it you’re finding out more and more about the model of humanity you have in your head, and whether it fits the real world or not.
6. Learn to challenge your industry leaders.
   So, the industry leader is an odd role at the intersection of a tutor and a boss — you will want to impress them as you would a boss, because you’ll value their feedback and they’ll be checking up on you (besides which, some of them will certainly act as if they were your boss). You’ll also want to drain them of all the knowledge they have and use it in your own work, like you would a tutor. The problem emerges when you realise they are all still very much human and flawed in the way all humans are.
   The closer the leaders get to your field of expertise the more you will realise that they are not your superiors but in fact your peers; they will make mistakes of the sort you sometimes worry about making, fail to answer questions with the degree of rigour you’d expect, etc.
   I don’t say this to make out that they aren’t worthwhile (in fact in some cases they were the best part of the module), but to try to help you place yourself in the Hyper hierarchy — which is to say, it’s only a hierarchy if you make it a hierarchy.
7. Learn about the power you have, and the difference it can make.
   There’s a really good article here about the new responsibilities designers have in the twenty-first century. It talks about the new super-concentrations of power and wealth in Silicon Valley, and how designers have a responsibility to make sure they aren’t contributing to this concentration in whatever work they do.
   So do you. When you’re coming up with a new app or product, ask yourself about the relationship you’re going to have with customers. Are they going to understand how it was created? Will they have an easy way to get in touch if it ruins their lives somehow? Where is their data going? Who else is using it? Will GCHQ and the NSA love you, or hate you? Will people be materially any better off because of your thing, or is it just something shiny that passes the time?

Have fun.