Hackathon doesn’t mean writing on post-its all night long
Giulia Logo Di Gregorio from H-FARM Consultancy
The word hackathon is a mixture of the words hack and marathon, where hack is used in the sense of playful and exploratory programming.
It is a “hacker” marathon in which participants, collaborate in a limited time-frame to design solutions to face today’s challenge.
Leveraging on our years of experience in organizing hackathons, here at H-FARM we have understood that the main ingredients are:
- Consolidated Design methods
- Diverse teams ready to work together
- A limited time-frame, to work intensively on ideas
Let’s go over the importance of these ingredients in the success of a hackathon.
#1 Consolidated design methods
Design plays a key role in the construction of methods, activities, alternative tools to face a complicated challenge and build a solution. Before jumping to the identification of a solution, our approach is to spend some time to reframe the problem and generate more than one idea. Once the team has multiple ideas on the table, they pick the most promising one.
Visualizing concepts and ideas allows the teams to evaluate them more quickly. This approach helps to stimulate critical thinking and idea generation. That’s why teams need both support from our facilitators, and some frameworks to guide participants towards tangible ideas.
Frameworks come from our Design ThinKIT, a toolkit designed by a team of service designers to simplify the process of generating and build the idea right.
#2 Diverse teams ready to work together
Regardless of whether the hackathon is internal to a company, open to everyone, or a mix of company employees and external hackers, it’s good to build teams of people with different backgrounds and skills.
A hackathon is a co-creative moment, seek diverse perspectives and inspirations involving all kinds of stakeholders and users!
#3 A limited time-frame, to work intensively on ideas
Keeping engagement high is key, which is why hackathons are never diluted in time.
Traditionally they have a duration of 24 hours non-stop, this allows groups to exploit their instincts, to think by doing, and prevents them from getting lost in long, unprofitable discussions.
Despite this, it’s possible to break the rule and organize a hackathon on two days, without working at night, the important thing is not to make them last too long and provide energizing activities to keep the attention high.
What about a remote hackathon?
An opportunity to reach people from different locations!
An example:
Hack E Rare, it’s a full remote hackathon we organize for global biotechnology leader CSL Behring. It involves students and young graduates in pharmacy, chemistry, pharmaceutical technology, and design all around Italy. It’s all about choosing digital tools that are friendly and that enable collaboration such as Miro.
