This semester so far been a nonstop race to the finish for my MFA Thesis, but I realized my thoughts were getting stale. What I needed was to clear my head and think about a different problem for a change. So, this weekend I took part in the GOOD Magazine Design Hackathon challenge.

(Yes that’s right. I’m taking a break to work my ass even harder, lose sleep, freak out, skip breakfast, and… as it were, make new friends while goofing off and having buckets of fun.)

Day 0

It started off promisingly enough. My team was solid, consisting of the irrepressible Gene Lu, the ultra-emphathetic Sera Koo, and my favorite badass code-slinger, Yang Yang. SVA IxDers + Yang was a good combination before, and I was confident we’d make something incredible together. We spent the evening before brainstorming at Le Pain Quotidienne, equipped with stickynotes, sharpies, chocolate mousse and tea.

Day 1

Alas, the morning of, Gene woke up feeling too sick to participate and Sera of course had to be by his side. So Yang and I ventured alone to Parsons, not sure of what to expect.

We arrived and were promptly shepherded into a large room, where tables were laid out with power strips. There was a short introductory presentation, then some people started to set up their laptops. We walked around looking for a group. Since this was a competitive hackathon, I was a little apprehensive. Would we end up with sufficiently able-bodied teammates? What if we were’t compatible, we didn’t work well together? What if I drive them crazy? At least my classmates were used to my numerous quirks.

I felt the first pangs of discouragement when the time was up for teammate hunting and we still had not found a group. They started to randomly assign us leftovers into teams together. I felt like the kid who was picked last in gym class. Oddly, I did not want to be with the other picked-last kids because, well, they were picked last too.

I will now admit that, at this point in time, it occurred to me that maybe I should just drop out and perhaps join the rest of my bedridden team. Maybe we’ll watch a movie or something.

But… as you can probably tell by the length of this post, I didn’t. And I am glad I didn’t. Because staying afforded me the opportunity to learn yet another good lesson about life:

The picked-last kids are great players for reasons you’d never expect.

In other words:

Don’t be a prejudgemental snob, even if attending an elite design program has subconsciously made you so.

My teammates ended up being everything a design hacker could want for a frenzied weekend of high-speed thinking and making: energetic, mutually supportive, hilarious, positive, helpful, intelligent. We bonded instantly. It was decided early on that there would be no pretensions, no apologies, no affected politeness. It would be blood, sweat, and tears (FUN tears!), and we were in it together.

Now we’re talking.

And what’s more, my teammates had something that ended up being a big advantage in hackathons: no idea whatsoever what a proper “design process” was. And this is good because really, when you have a little over a day to build something, who has the time for a discovery phase? How can you possibly fully “understand the problem space”? We had to agree on an idea as fast as we could based on pure instinct, and then roll up our sleeves to iterate on it like crazy. And that’s exactly what we did.

Of course, we did give fair consideration to a bevy of other promising ideas, including the brilliantly named SubCulture. It was going to be a site that lets you schedule and locate mini-events held in MTA subway cars. Niel DeGrasse Tyson lecturing on your morning commute, anyone? (It ended up that one of the other teams had happened on almost the same exact idea, and called it MTAcademy. Oh, shared headspace…)

The idea that we eventually ended up with was called EveryStep. It’s a random idea I had a long time ago for using run tracker data and micro-donations from friends to raise money for non-profits. Your friends would give your cause 25¢ for every mile you run, or something like that, thereby encouraging you to get active. And you’d be accountable to your cause, thus more motivated to run.

We had a lot of fun with this, hashing out the details, slapping stickies everywhere, drawing delightfully slop-tastic wireframes and userflows, dissecting the finer points of human psychology, putting numbers into a spreadsheet to test feasibility of donation amounts, and even running impromptu user studies. Aliona and Emily went out to gather opinions from people on the street, Eric “A/B tested” some hand-drawn wireframes on fellow hackathoners, and I called my friends to gauge their willingness to use such an app. With actual feedback in hand, we were able to make decisions quickly, erase doubt, clarify points that needed to be clarified, and shore up the concept from all sides.

Meanwhile, Yang was kind of off by himself coding a—and this absolutely fills me with the most loving kind of envy—Javascript runtracker that can count your steps via your iPhone browser.

Seriously. I didn’t know you could do that in a few hours.

By the time 8pm came around, we were being gently but firmly ushered out by janitors (so early, I know). But we were all pretty exhausted. Assignments were doled out for the evening, with promises to distribute files into Dropbox/email/Google Docs by midnight. We parted ways. Yang and I went home whereupon we continued work until 1am, and then we went to bed.

Day 3

I woke up early in the morning and saw that Aliona and Eric had kept good on their promises, but there was still more to do. At this point, I decided to take matters into my own hands and finish building the presentation myself. All those hours spent making SVA IxD pitch decks came in handy! Big pictures, compelling narrative, blah blah blah. I threw it all in a Keynote, cobbled together a last-minute concept diagram, and dragged Yang out of bed.

We arrived at Parsons at 11:10, just in time to catch the latter half of a presentation I didn’t want to miss—other friends from SVA IxD were also in the Hackathon, and they presented a beautiful pitch for an idea called “Purpose.” When they left, all bleary-eyed but happy to be done, Yang and I opened our laptops and continued to hack away quietly in the corner of the auditorium. Our other teammates soon arrived, bearing hydration—thank god for teammates. The minutes ticked down on the clock as we scambled to finish the presentation for our slot at 4pm.

And then, at 2:30pm, I hit the export button and that was that. Whew… but we weren’t totally done.

After that, I still had to throw together the final designs for the demo. I had never designed so freakin’ fast in my life. The pixel-perfectionist in me died a little this afternoon. There was no time to nudge anything! None!

But perhaps, it’s for the better.

Perfectionism, as they say, is no way to live a life.

At some point Aliona ran out to get me a smoothie because I was running on empty. I can’t remember slurping it all down (I just remember asking her for something I could consume hands-free.)

And finally, finally, it was our turn to go up on stage.

This part was a blur. Obviously, we did not practice at all, but the show went on because it had to. All I remember was that I made the audience laugh a lot, something I seem to be good at in moments of massive internal panic. At some point I might have said this:

And then we were done. Done.

And yet we weren’t. Conversations with other teams followed. Connections were made. Emails written down. High-fives exchanged. Congratulations given.

Later: Bon-Chon consumed. Glasses clinked. Beers downed. Hugs given. Promises to keep in touch made.

Time Passes…

Now I’m home, both exhausted and energized.

I signed up this weekend merely to free my thoughts from thesis. And to, admittedly, make a bid for the prize with an all-star team.

Instead, I ended up momentarily yet deeply involved in a scintillating community of energetic positive thinkers from schools and companies in NYC and beyond. I made friends, saw how other people think, and learned useful new attitudes towards designing in situations that weren’t grad school.

Grad school can be so small. Especially a grad school program that tops out at 15 people per class. To be sure, these people are brilliant, each and every one of them. But they are 15 nonetheless.

If nothing else, today was a reminder of the actual size of the world, and all the great things that lie beyond these dry-erase markered walls. Even in New York alone, there are so many awesome, intelligent, funny, upbeat people with interesting ideas, all striving to make a difference. And the only way for  me to make the most of this community when I graduate is to realize that SVA IxD, totally kick-ass program that it is, is not the entire world of design. It’s merely here to shape how I will approach design as I begin my career in the field.

And on that note, I’m off to kick this final semester’s butt!

Appendix

Here is the project slide deck, for your enjoyment: