I went to participate in Social Beat‘s “Design Beat”, a one-day Hackathon to promote road safety, on Nov. 1, ’19. We were divided into teams of 3-4 and were given a brief on design thinking and our task for the day.
We were expected to brainstorm ideas, shortlist one idea and develop a small prototype (physical or digital) and present it before a panel of authorities who have a say on framing public policies here in Chennai, India.
Here is the presentation we (Team 10) made on that day:
*Presentation by Nupoor Rajkumar, Pujitha Reddy, Dheeraj & Rajesh K. **Since Slideshare doesn’t support MS Powerpoint Animation, please excuse those abstract lines on Slides 2-4.
The details about the idea/solution we developed to better road safety is embedded as a Slideshare Presentation above. This post is more about my experience participating in a Hackathon for social good.
As a content creator, the process of research, brainstorming ideas, and presenting it is nothing new to me. But, during this event, I realized the immense potential of collaboration.
Since we were a team of four people – all of us professionals in varied fields – the number of ideas we were able to put forward far exceeded those that I would have been able to conceive by myself.
The most interesting thing is, the final idea/solution we decided upon was an amalgamation of the best ideas put forth by all four of us.
Even preparing the presentation was a collaborative effort. Since I was fluent with Powerpoint & Animations, I took up the task of arranging all the text and images that were prepared and sent to me by the other three.
The final presentation was delivered by all of us, quite coherently, although we didn’t have a concrete plan of who would present when and how the presentation would flow. The flow just happened effectively with each of us pitching where necessary.
Although I would have preferred to have more time to make a better presentation (esp. with custom animation) I was still surprised at how much we were able to accomplish during the limited time we had. That shows that time restrictions get the job done. But for quality and professionalism, more time is required.
Altogether I learned a lot and enjoyed participating in this Hackathon. I hope to participate in more such hackathons, especially on the theme of social good.
Thanks to Social Beat for providing us with an opportunity to participate in this Hackathon. See the cool video below to know who they are 🙂