Stupid Hackathon review
“This seems like the sort of wonderfully useless thing that your company would want to either host or sponsor” isn’t usually the nicest message to receive from a friend. This time though, it was the beginning of something special.
“I’m just here to plant the idea” the message continued; concluding with a link to something called Stupid Hackathon.
That was our first contact with the one-day event where participants get together to make stupid shit that no one needs. I posted the link on Slack and asked if this is something that we should try and host in Oslo. You can count on one hand the numbers of minutes it took to get an overwhelmingly positive response. You can count on your other hand the number of hours we needed to set a date and start planning the event.
We quickly created a stupid website and bought the stupidest name we could think of: stupidhackath.no. Then the stupid ideas started. Lunch conversations turned into ideation sessions. Stupidity began bonding us.
When the big day came, we were really excited to see what would be created. We had no experience of running a stupid hackathon, nor did we know how people would respond. To get attendees to release their inner stupidity we ran a lightweight ideation session. “Technically Illegal”, “Artificial Evil”, and “Fashion, or the lack of it” were some of the categories we used as aids for idea creation. This evidently worked because it triggered a flood of creativity.
After picking an idea, forming a team, and making a plan; the rest of the day was set aside to hacking. People organised themselves into teams, and got stuck into the serious business of being stupid. It became a hackathon filled with laughter, and friendly discussions about how ideas could be made stupider.
In the evening we invited more people to see what had been created. The amount of presentations we had after just one day was amazing.
There were new mobile apps to make you feel bad; help you cut pizza in creative ways; tell you the time in really inconvenient style; play embarrassing sounds; and experience blindness.
There were web services to dramatically shorten your Netflix movie watching experiences; help you translate text from English to English (via several other languages); check if you have epilepsy; and entertain you in horse form.
“Tinder for socks” was launched to help you find a match for your missing socks; whilst the scream2scroll team brought their own style of usability to the web.
There were products to check if your employees are smiling enough, a keyboard that reduced the annoying amount of keys on a standard keyboard, a truly painful game of “lift the cactus”, and a non-waterproof karaoke shower that went on to be a big hit at the afterparty.
One team went all out and built a photo booth from scratch. The catch? It returns someone else’s photos.
There’s nothing stupid about stupid
In the middle of the stupid hackathon, out on the rooftop, there was a group of people painting, cutting, and assembling a photo booth. People who had first met a few hours previously; who had no idea when they woke up that morning what they’d dedicate their day to.
The team battled with stray splashes of paint, the realisations of fundamental errors, and the pressure to get things done. In amongst it all there was laughter, and team work, and creativity. “Stupid hackathon is a great excuse for adults to play like children again” someone told me.
Many came to the realisation that there is often a great idea at the heart of a stupid idea. It is also true to say that there’s something great at the heart of stupidity.
