What Glue say about themselves:
We are: A modern communications agency, as at home in the digital world as in traditional media. With 11 years experience in digital, we marry the best traditional agency skills with the most innovative digital talent, to create smart, provocative and irresistible creative work. Our team of 150 talented people is hard at work across an enviable client list including Nokia, Toyota, RBS, and Kellogg's
What we do: We bring people and brands together, like never before. We reconnect brands with their fans and customers. We create irresistible ideas that combine creative, planning, technology and data. Ideas that demand a response, that invite a next step, take on a life of their own, become self-financing, self-perpetuating, get picked up, passed on. Ideas that make it inevitable people will choose to get involved.
As well as their website Glue are on Flickr and Youtube
Derek spoke to: Jo Hagger; Dan Griffiths; Simon Cam (Scam) and Dominik
We began with a discussion about the sorts of things students need to be doing to improve their employability. Scam/ Dan & Dominik talked about the use of online communities: creative cow/ video co pilot etc.. should exploit links/ motion script.com/ google for techniques/ for Flash ‘fullasagoog’
DY: is it educations role to develop these technical skills
Glue: It’s not possible for a university lecturer to do this – they would have to be working in industry everyday.
Scam: “the educators role is to provide the other side to all of this which is the creative & philosophical core of what they are doing and give them the skills to take on a brief and understand it properly, to work with other people and all of those softer skills that go around the main hands on practical, technical doing skills.” Although some students will naturally gravitate to the technical side of things.
DY: If a student doesn’t naturally gravitate towards the technical end, should they enter that (digital media) part of the industry or can we guide them? Help them get started?
Glue: Education should make them see why they need to develop these skills, i.e here is what you can do/ achieve if you learn them. “(education) Should aim to create problem solvers less than creating technicians. The approach should be I wanna find out how to do that, I’ll then go and find out how to do that, because you don’t need to know every part of the application to actually get quite specific. It’s about having that inherent interest in the field…even if you are an art director, you need to know how things are made in order to push them forward” To be able to guide and direct, you need to know how something is made and understand it’s mechanics, this is the way things have always been. It’s really important to understand what a team will enable. At Glue to create any piece of work there is a whole range of people involved and without all these different people any project would not be possible. It’s a mixture of creatives and technicians that make a project happen.
Scam: “certainly one thing that I’d say to my old lecturers is – get bigger groups of people working together. Get a photographer working with someone who is just a creative and loves drawing on paper. Get someone who loves to have lots of ideas working with someone who is really into actions scripting.”
You need to identify where your specialisms are, but you also have to keep yourself fairly broad. (to DY) How is the course set up in terms of time? at college we learnt how to think creatively and then went away and taught ourselves how to execute our ideas, but the management of time is equally important. In the last year we had one project for the whole of a term, which is a big ask. At college there is lots of lost time.
Scam “One of the biggest steps from university into work is getting into a routine of working 9.30 til 6.30 everyday and beyond to actually achieve what you want to achieve”. Students need to learn to use all the time they have got available to them because they are not going to achieve anything by working 10 hours a week.
DY: How do you engender teamworking? How do you get students to work together with other students when todays Higher Educational model is largely get a brief and go off on your own?
Glue: Well that was actually beneficial to a lot of us because the equipment we needed wasn’t available at college. We needed to use IT equipment and the colleges couldn’t provide that and they shouldn’t really have tried.
DY: but If there is no technical equipment in the studio. What makes a student come in and use the studio? Why not work from home? and if working from home is so good why do design companies spend so much on studio space?
Glue: Because in a design company you need to work in a team.
Jo Hagger: Maybe we should separate out some of the themes that you deal with everyday here. What are the core disciplines that students have to learn. Tools to explore techniques – these can be accessed individually (open source etc..) and their approach to learning….“this absolutely has to be, from a commercial point of view, the critical balance between being able to solve problems on your own, knowing that if you do have to solve a problem within 8 hours you actually get to a solution, vs the fact that you have to able to talk to other people about what you are doing as well. You can’t just work in a silo, because … there are very few interactive projects that one person can do on their own, in a commercial sense it involves a team of people.”
“individual problem solving, group problem solving, time specific problem solving all of these are real world perameters and the best students we see all come pretty well equipped with these skills”
Glue: Different types of disciplines require different types of learning. But it’s about being clear about the up front stuff that they absolutely need to learn and covering that in a controlled setting. You have to learn it before you go off and experiment, because this will give you the core that you need to get started. The next layer is opening their mind to the possibilities that exist, via mentors, via best practice, via other things that exist in the world then starting to implement that creativity and play around. Then there is a semi controlled bit which is saying here is how we are going to suggest you are going to work which is a mixture of independent activity balanced with times when they have to come into the studio, discuss work, take part in seminars.
Dominik: the discussion activity doesn’t always have to be about discussing projects, it could be just about discussing things that they have found interesting, exhibitions, stuff they have found on the net.
DY: the studio needs to be of use to the students and if they see activities as useful then they will take part in them you have to set up different types of activity to enable that. What you say about promoting cross disciplinary activities and discussion is interesting, I wonder what you think about how courses are currently set up in different subject areas?
Dominik: people definitely pick the wrong courses and would benefit from being able to change later in the course.
“I wonder if there is scope for a degree of fluidity where you do keep some core outlines for different areas of study that you think you’re going to dip in and out of but there is some fluidity there and if you realize that you are studying the wrong thing after year one then you can change?”
Dan: There needs to be scope to extend the foundation ethos and enable to students to work across different areas and share ideas with students and staff from these areas.
Dominik: I studied town planning!
Scam: says it all really, if you want to do something you can learn it. It’s about an approach rather than the subject.
Dominik: it’s the spark of curiosity and hunger that’s important. But how you develop that?
DY: yeah there is a problem with the prescription of vocational education. It kills the curiosity. How can you create savvy students, who are still curious. Students are motivated by goals like getting a job rather than hunger to learn. Is the principle of that type of learning anti curiosity>
Jo: certainly it’s a problem “one of the difficulties faced by education is that it used to deal with something that used to be linear and easy to package and fitted categorization pretty easily and now it’s faced with something much bigger, cross disciplined, much broader and much more complex and multi faceted. But the same is true of industry. It all boils down to problems with categorization that is making something that shouldn’t be that deep, deep. So you get categories that don’t quite fit, when what is really interesting is the skills, the methods and approaches that are universal.”
DY: How do you recruit graduates?
Dominik: go round degree shows and look at work.
Dan: But it is difficult in the design department, Without practical skills you sit around a bit lost, but you don’t want someone with practical skills but no ability to develop into other areas.. You need someone who can add value creatively and without this you can get stuck doing menial tasks. So employing a creative represents a huge investment.
Glue: Placements and internships are difficult because of the time they take up and are not always economic as a result. But if you can get someone for a period of time and build a relationship it can be very useful. The real value is a student who does a placement goes back to college and comes back when they graduate.
Dominik: it’s really beneficial to build a relationship through which the student can learn to work with us. A 3 month placement is good, but more beneficial if they came back.
Scam: Hyper Island do it really well with a 7 month placement at the end of the course.
DY: so what is the best time for a placement?
Dan: I quite like the idea of 6 weeks in the second year, turning into 3 months in their third year just before they graduate and if they are good they get employed.
DY: We’ve found that there can be a negative aspect to this, sometimes students return very disillusioned because of a negative placement. But when it is good the student has built a relationship and gained a set of experiences that will help enrich their college experience and inform their work.
Jo: so that depends on the right company with the right people. The pay off for the company is first pick at the right people.
DY: Can education do more to make it beneficial for industry? For example, we did a project with Moving Brands project that was used to help middle-weight designers to gain people management and creative leadership skills.
Dan: One of the most difficult things about placements is managing the students time, so what would be really good is for the student to come to us with a piece of work, a goal, something they want to achieve and the student could work on that for 50% of their time and people across the different teams could get involved in. For the other 50% of the time they could be brought into Glue projects or the many things around the agency that get lost and aren’t picked up on and taken advantage of. We were talking today about Glue’s brand presence and this is something a placement could look at. It needs people involved in it constantly
Scam: it kind of needs to be flexible, because the truth is that you are never sure if there is going to be stuff for them to do.
DY: is it helpful for us to help out with the organization. Also is working on a job always beneficial for a student, sometimes it means being cheap labour.
Scam: Sure. It’s really true, placements need to be managed and sometimes doing rotascoping is useful for us but not them.
Dan: the practicalities are important. We need to get diaries set up upfront and put key dates and times in so there is a structure to the placement. At the moment it’s down to the student and it works if the student is proactive but doesn’t if they are not.
DY: could the college put that structure into place.
Dan: Absolutely, but it’s also about getting traffic involved and making sure they plug the placement into that system.
DY: a member of staff at the college could work with you on this but at the moment that isn’t practical. Although long term maybe someone could be given the job of managing placements.
Dan: Not sure it even needs to be a member of staff. Could we put into place a structure, which makes it clear that it’s the students responsibility to work their way through a set list of tasks.
DY: staff could meet upfront and negotiate a project that would be appropriate. There could even be R&D projects.
JO: A generic list of milestones, that would provide a formal structure, could be generic enough to be suitable to a range of placements.
DY: We could work together to create this and develop something that both Glue and the UAL could use. We have a handbook in place but it needs a clearer structure.
Jo: Well that would be useful for us as would some investigation into other placement models and a look at how education can help with things like staff development.
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