Design is a team sport and Figma is rallying everyone up.
A recap of the Figma Africa Hackathon (Lagos Edition)
Prior to the Figma Roadshow which happened in May 2018, Figma has recently been at the forefront of bringing designers, developer and pretty much everyone in the digital product development cycle together. Last month Figma took it a notch higher when they announced the Figma Africa Hackathon which was themed “DESIGN, DEVELOP, COLLABORATE”.
The goal was to bridge the gaps between Designers and Developers through real-time collaboration, as we know this would not only ease the workflow process but also make communication a lot more effective and efficient.
A total of 17 teams (3 members per team) was selected after sieving through the hundreds of entries and on the 21st of July, all roads led to one of the coolest workspaces in Lagos, the MEST Africa office in Ikoyi. The Hackathon was a collaborative partnership between Figma, GitHub and Ingressive. By 9 am we had some early birds trooping into the event centre with brims and smiles and within the hour we had the space fully packed with Designers and Developers.
Figma Africa’s lead design advocate, our very own “design honcho” Namnso Ukpanah kicked off the event by welcoming everyone, he announced the rules and guidelines for the Hackathon, judging criteria and what was expected from the teams. GitHub’s Developer Advocate, Adewale Abati ♠ was also on ground and he dropped some tips and nifty hacks for the participants, shortly after that, the event kicked off and participants started hacking away.
Being a facilitator at the event I was saddled with the task of going around the teams, listening to their solutions and assist with fine tuning it if necessary. Shameless plug — I’m a 3-time Hackathon winner 🏅(yes, call me serial hacker 💪🏾); I have participated in 4 Hackathons and won 3 🏆so yeah, I’m quite experienced at this. The teams were to build solutions that would have social impact in Health, Education and Agriculture.
Did I mention there were coffee, energy snacks and soda to get our sugar levels up for the many task ahead and within a short period the temperature in the room got a bit warm I guess this was due to the number RAM being processed and the air was filled with the smell of coffee and soda.
At 1 pm we got announcements that lunch was ready and between you and me, one of the reasons I loved attending Hackathons was because of the food 😉 and the Figma Africa Hackathon was no different, there were plenty food and snacks. We even had a fruit bar 🍉 🍌 🍎. We had lunch and the teams went back to pushing pixels and committing codes to build their solutions. Minutes stretched into hours and hours into more hours and by the time I looked outside the window, it was already dark.
Between the Figma X GitHub was a 24 hours Hackathon (the first I’ve attended in Lagos) this meant teams would be working into the wee hours of the night to make sure they completed their solutions. I personally was really excited about this and couldn’t wait to see the outcome of this interesting and immersive experience. And i wasn’t disappointed, just as I had imagined at 3:15 am the energy level was still vibrantly strong and the teams were still busy converting pixels to code, as I went around looking through their solutions I was deeply impressed with what I saw and just kept imagining the possibilities of what the future of design and technology would be if more youths were engaged with these practices.
This is one of the reasons why I believe Figma would be one of the best design and collaborative tool of our time, it goes way beyond just pushing pixels and converting them into code and in the words of Meng To, Figma is more than a design tool, It’s a community!!. Because designers and developers are also humans, we can cheat nature and by 4:55 am, energy levels were down we had to go take a nap to refresh our minds and prepare for demo/pitching later in the day.
DAY 2
It’s day 2 and Pitch/Demo day was just a few hours away at this point some of the teams were in a frenzy testing their solutions and making sure their prototypes were pixel perfect with smooth transitions and what not. Breakfast 🥞 was served at 8 am and the teams went back to hacking and tinkering for the remaining hours. I did my final round of check up and gave Mural support to the team that needed it, I was quite happy at the progress they’ve made in 24hrs.
Least I forget my fellow Figma Africa ambassadors and design colleagues Eleojo Emmanuel and Florence Dairo were also on ground to support and help the teams. We also had a special guest from the Figma management team in the states in person of Claire Butler. Claire is the international community program lead of Figma and she was also excited and pumped up of the rate at which the community has grown here in Nigeria 🇳🇬 and Africa 🌍 in general. Claire went around to see the solutions teams were working on and was given a quick brief by team leads of what their solutions were and the value they intended on adding to the society.
At 2:45 pm Namnso announced pitching would begin in a few minutes and urged the team leads to wrap up their pitch deck and make sure their prototypes were ready and functional.
The outdoor lawn of MEST Africa office had a nice canopy standing tall on it and guests were already arriving for the event. I had MC duties 🎤 to perform (which I must say I’m getting good at 😉) and at 3:15 pm I welcomed our guests and gave a quick rundown of what transpired the day before and what the teams were working on. We had a 3-man/woman panel of judges in persons of Dara Oke, William Imoh and Yemi Johnson.
For the next few hours, we had all 17 teams pitch their solutions to the judges, it was an exhilarating experience with pulsating moments as they battled it out for the coveted 1st price 🥇 and bragging rights. The last but not the least team, Team Dragonglass (weird name for a tech team yeah?) gave their pitch and thereafter
the judges went into the inner room to decide on which teams executed their ideas best. Whilst the judges were deliberating, Namnso Ukpanah engaged the audience with a quick Kahoot! game (a tech event without kahoot, is that one a tech event?) and as usual Figma swags were rewarded to winning participants.
As we wrapped up on that the moment of truth came as we had Dara Oke step on the stage to announce the winners of the Hackathon.
- In third place 🥉 was Team Sirocco they Created a health management system that every Nigerian can access via web, mobile and USSD.
- The Second position 🥈 went to Team Exolve. They worked on a food distribution app that solves the problem of food shortage in Nigeria by connecting farmers with food suppliers and distributors.
- And the winning team 🥇 of the 2018 Figma x GitHub Hackathon was Team Brookly! They created an Edtech platform that solves the problem of education in Nigeria public schools.
The winners bagged cash prizes of $200, $300 and $500 respectively.
This is definitely the beginning of many more events like this to come and In case you’re wondering how you can be apart of this? Join us today on SLACK to catch up on what we are up to, continue the discussions online and meet with lots of amazing designers from other cities. You can also follow us on our social media handles Twitter and Instagram
A big shoutout to the Figma, GitHub and the Ingressive teams for making this happen, see y’all again next year.
If you have ever attended any of our Figma Meetups and got to experience or learnt something insightful or wonderful or simply just feel like sharing your experience? Please do write about it or send us a DM on twitter or Slack, let’s share our experiences and motivate others. Yay!!!!!
You can join us on Slack at https://figma-africa.slack.com, follow us on twitter at https://twitter.com/figma_africa
