Reflecting on Hack4Impact Design as a National Director
It’s been about a year since I was the National Director of Design! It’s been a journey to collaborate with so many motivated individuals across the country — and I’ve even been able to meet my co-director Tiffany, in real life! Below is a recap of what Design at Hack4Impact nationals has been up to, and where we’re going.
First Chapter — Open-source guides + Chapter Mentoring + Website Revamp
In the early stages, we first wanted to define what design is — especially in an organization that provides non-profit consultation and not necessarily one where we work on our own time. Drawing experiences from my own first semester as a designer at the Cornell chapter, we collaborated with products to create an integrated timeline for chapters to follow. After interviewing several established chapters and taking our own learnings — we compiled our insights into a comprehensive Design Guide! Eventually, this expanded to include tips on recruiting and resources for growing designers!
We also established direct chapter mentoring — where we created individual channels for new chapters to ask us about proper design practices. Finally, with the amazing help of engineering, was finally able to revamp the Hack4Impact website!
Second Chapter — Interactive Workshops, Seminars, and Community Building!
We did an audit and learned that many designers and chapters at H4I did not know about the resources that Nationals was providing! To provide a more direct impact, we created three sets of workshops focusing on Product design cycle + Figma basics, User Research and Testing, and Accessibility! You can view them here! We got great reviews from the workshop series, and hope to continue them in the future.
In addition to workshops, we wanted to make Hack4Impact design feel like a community. We held our first-ever design mixer over zoom, and invited Kat Zhou (a designer at IBM and now Spotify) to teach a seminar on frameworks to design ethically!
However, as we’ve progressed into a more in-person era, it’s been hard to keep up operations and engagement virtually. Nationals will have to do more brainstorming on how we can support design culture at H4I perhaps asynchronously. I’m excited for what’s to come and can’t wait to see how the design community in H4I will grow closer and advance through the years!
Where next?
It’s been a wild journey since then, and I’m happy to announce that the next Director of Design for Nationals will be Chaeeun Park! Chaeeun is a dear friend of mine who helped me with creating Cornell Hack4Impact’s design team and we’ve gone on to do the Civic Digital Fellowship together in the fall! They’ll be auditing current design practices at various design chapters and designing more customized resources to help burgeoning chapters that don’t have a pre-existing design culture at their school — I can’t wait to see what’s next!
Bonus!
I also happened to pass by Tiffany’s school and got to meet her IRL! Super grateful for the opportunity to shape H4I design in the past year to be able to meet so many interesting people across the country!
