Designathon 2018

Published in

Bruin Entrepreneurs Stories

8 min readMay 6, 2018

Designathon was a day-long event hosted by Bruin Entrepreneurs and Creative Labs with the goal of fostering a community of designers at UCLA.

On top of participating in a 3 hour competition, student designers and creatives from diverse backgrounds and skill levels had the opportunity to participate in workshops and attend keynotes by distinguished speakers!

During the competition, participants had the option of taking a graphic design track or a UI/UX track. Additionally, participants were able to receive feedback from designers and learned more about opportunities in the industry while meeting other students with the similar interests in design.

The competition theme was “Growth”. Check out the amazing projects that participants worked on!

Graphic design track

1st Place — E

Johan Cristobal

The goal was to be able to portray the idea of “growth” using the mathematical idea of the irrational exponential, e.
Process:
The hard part was finding words that are synonymous with growth that start with e. There are a lot more than the ones I used.
Tools Used:
Everything I made was inside Photoshop. I used Google for image references of the icosahedron and dodecahedron. But I manually traced over each segment of the shape.
The exponential graph I have I got using Desmos (an online graphing calculator) and I traced over it.

2nd place — It’s Time for Growth

Taylor Lee, Jennifer Vuong and Sharon Wu

Our story:
A circle of life, of the daily. Against a backdrop of black and white, societal “rights” and “wrongs”, we grow through each cycle of the clock, exploring and discovering new gems of colors to brighten our lives. Time is finite, but growth is infinite. Even through cracks of destruction, experiences are gained and lessons are learned; growth prevails. And there is always opportunity for rebirth underlying this destruction.
Goal:
The meanings of each color are attached and to be interpreted by the user. It is a universal depiction of one’s progression over time.

The Price of Progress

Angela Zhou, Darius Chua and Jonathan Wang

Titled “The Price of Progress”, this piece features a child in a slum staring skywards as pieces of trash fall down around him. The child growing up amongst a growing trash heap symbolises the cost that humanity pays for its progress. While some societies grow wealthier over time, this only increases the disparity between socioeconomic groups; growth generates waste in a timeless paradox.

In creating this piece, we debated over many visual representations of the theme of growth as a double edged sword. We drafted many of these ideas, but ultimately picked the one of the child in a trash heap. We wanted to utilize the movement implied in the theme, so we created a gif instead of a graphic still.

User Experience Track

First Place — Akt

Annie Phan, Trevor Harrison and Eunji Song

2nd Place- Wasted

Stacy Li and Doroty Sanussi

The Story:
After getting lunch on campus one day, we noticed that many individuals on campus do not know how to properly dispose of their food waste. There were cans in the trash, papers bags in the compost, and a whole abundance of nonsense in the recycling bins. People simply don’t know how to dispose of waste!
Goals:
We ultimately wanted to build something that was interactive and educational, and would create a meaningful impact on campus. We want to fix the large waste disposal problem on campus as well as provide a way for businesses on campus to be involved in this ecological love.
Process:
A long brainstorming process…