A very exciting day today. A few hours ago I signed my name on a contract which ties me to the purchase of a house. The house, photo above, is very very nice and I’m sure I will bore you with many details further down the line.
This post is mainly a stamp in time. If you don’t post the day you buy a house, you really should reconsider your blog ;)
As creatives in the ad business, we know that comin up with ideas can take you away from the important thing sin life. Family. Friends. Absorbing culture. Couaching soccer. Reality TV. Sex parties.
Stealourideas.com is here to help you get back to the happines that you’ve sacrificed to work long hours in creative industries. Our blog entreis will save you the time and energy it usually takes to think og stuff, while building the credit needed to chat yourself up at award shows.
On the 12th of May the Swedish magazine, Resume, published online a short article entitled “They Will Steer Hyper Island“. The article is about a new professional board of directors, expansions, profits and it included a photo of 7 middle aged white men dressed in cheap black suite and v-necks… haven’t we all seen this “future” before?
Foto: Peter Jönsson
Many of the comments on the article raise the question ‘where are all the women?’. Fare enough, but not quite unexpected since in Sweden you get that question whenever the majority isn’t female. One comment, on the other hand, takes a wider picture and asks where are all the rest:
HyperIsland is a great school, that’s for sure. But please, don’t talk about growing and opening up to the world, and then present a board of administration composed only of 30 to 50-y.o. swedish men with 100% swedish background, because this picture tells another story, really.
For sure, it hurts to know that the board of directors for McDonalds, Costco Wholesale, FedEx and even the US Iraq Study Group all include both men and women and has a wider cultural spread than a foremost new media school in Sweden.
But that’s not my biggest issue here.
That’s not what rubs me the wrong way.
I read the article, look at that photo and wonder; where did it all go wrong?
As a former student and post lecturer, for me, in many ways, Hyper Island was the ‘crack in the wall’, the ‘lunatic’, the ‘[ones] who understand that culture and design are not about fatter wallets, but about creating a future’, the [ones who] understand that wealth is a means, not an end’ that Tibor Kalman explains in his essay ‘FUCK COMMITTEES (I believe in lunatics)‘.
In my view, Mattias Hansson, the CEO since ’07, has failed to acknowledge the strength of Hyper Island and what led to it’s success, and is trying to mould it into something he and the corporate world can understand to at least retain it’s success on paper.
Personally, I think all of this is a massive mistake.
And it makes me sad.
