Tuesday, February 5th, 2013
As the title would suggest, I’ve never been involved in a ‘Hack‘ event before, despite my inherent desire to create in my spare time and jump on new side projects at the twitch of a cats whisker. I’ve always been impressed and inspired by what others have created in such a short span of time, and how that sort of rapid development really forces a different way of working. Being a perfectionist for pixels and a stickler for style, quick design isn’t something which comes naturally to me, as I always want to create the best thing possible regardless of time. Sometimes design works for me, and sometimes it takes a bit of time, inspiration and reflection. The hackathon in question was hosted at the Stone computer stand, at the BETT Learning technology event at the London Excel, and everything had to be in someway related to education or schools.
We had a few ideas going into the event on Wednesday morning, but after meeting the legend who is Johnny Ball, we were inspired by another concept he had excitedly explained to us. The idea was essentially using the mind training system Pelmanism in some way to create a game to assist with learning sequences of facts/information as an aid. Essentially, if you do something enough times, it’ll sink into your brain and you’ll learn it, in the same principle that certain rhymes or songs might help remember the order of the colour spectrum or planets. But while the pelmanism system generally manifests itself as a card game, we wanted to create a utility which would be flexible and expansive for teachers and students.
Mark Steadman was the master who built the app back-end, logic and implemented my front-end, and Jack Smith helped out with the initial idea and UI feedback, while working on the front-end of another project. I’d love to share more about the app, but for the moment we’re keeping quiet until we’ve added a few more features and polished up the front end experience… It’s almost a curse to say these words, but, it’s ‘coming soon’.
But now for some thoughts and personal reflections on the event… It was both exciting, inspiring, fun, and totally exhausting. I work hard at Substrakt, but not consistently like I did from 10-5 those 3 days. Once we began, I barely moved, only getting up to ask for more coffee, and then exiting said coffee a little while later. Being a very noisy environment meant having to really focus on what you were doing, and not letting things which would usually break your concentration do so… although noise cancelling headphones helped too.
Being a perfectionist, settling on a layout, colour and typography was something I struggled with over the days, even though these things didn’t really matter when It came down to the judging. It was all about the idea and concept, and how well a prototype could prove it in practice. Even though I knew this, I still constantly tweaked, and only annoyed myself in the process. When It comes down to the mark, I don’t see myself as a ‘hacker’, as to me it suggests throwing something together, opposed to crafting it, and the latter is just how I work. Working quickly isn’t an alien concept to me as a designer & developer working for a responsive agency (tenders, short client deadlines etc), but designing for myself either makes this harder, or easier.
Despite being there for 3 days, the emphasis for the organisers of the event was to create something new everyday. This added further pressure and stress, as we were expected to present our app each day, even though we knew we didn’t have anything complete to show off… (until the last day that is). So while this seemed a bit pointless at first, the added rush of a deadline pushed us to really focus on achievable goals and productivity > procrastination. Overall though, setting our own goals, working on what we wanted, and working how we wanted was certainly liberating, and was hopefully a taste of how I’d be working in the future.
So to conclude, I found it a very enriching experience & opportunity , and I’d most definitely do another one, despite the sense of detriment to my personal health due to junk food and sugar consumption! But more importantly, many thanks to Stone for hosting the event in their booth space, being so inviting, helpful, generous and providing the prizes. Also thanks to the organisers of the event itself; Hackathon Central who arranged the concept and event sign-up.