Announcing M+ Online Hackathon — City of Objects

If you have been following along with our posts on M+ Labs, you might know that our third M+ Hackathon was originally planned for 22–23 February 2020 and had to be postponed due to the global COVID-19 situation. Rather than missing out on an opportunity to engage with our creative community, we’ve decided to move this event online, making it more accessible to everyone who wants to join in. This online design thinking workshop will take place from 1–15 August 2020.

The online workshop will be our third hackathon, M+ Online Hackathon — City of Objects, and will introduce a focus on ‘objects’. Facilitators will invite participants to embark on a journey that explores the concept of objects through different lenses — everyday life, personal and cultural identities, and virtuality. Sign up before 30 July to participate.

This edition of the M+ hackathon is developed in collaboration with designers and educators Chun-wo Pat and Christian Marc Schmidt. It is the first event in ObjectiCity, a series of workshops designed by Pat and Christian. The ObjectiCity series aims to encourage creative thinking and projects through unpacking the politics of objects in relation to their social and cultural contexts.

A Focus on Objects

As a museum of visual culture, M+ collects objects of all types: paintings, sculptures, graphic design, architectural models, archival ephemera — just to name a few. However, museums aren’t the only entities that collect. As individuals, everyone in the world collects objects that constitute ‘personal museums’, according to Pat and Christian:

‘Objects are all around us. They shape history and culture. The making of an object and the narrative that underlies it are an essential aspect of cultural identity. Objects are the reflection of a human thought process. They reveal our personal identity. In the vast digital network, objects are visual and virtual. They move between the haptic and the optic. Their meanings shift from time to time. They become an image, a memory. They create a new kind of identity that is untouchable. […]

Above all, […] [there’s probably] a new kind of museum where everyone is a curator and where objects in the home and the city are analogous to objects in a museum. We “curate” objects around us subconsciously through our experience and understanding. That “personal museum” shapes our perception and interaction with the world we live in.’

What You Can Expect

We encourage you to think deeply about objects in this hackathon. You can:

• Challenge perceptions of objects
• Think creatively about objects
• Build and develop: design projects that visualise objects, game projects that involve objects, learning projects inspired by objects
• Create something entirely new and unexpected — a project, a method, a process of thinking

Over 6,200 records from the M+ Collections are now online in our open data set and on our Collections Beta platform. This represents over 8,000 objects and more than 900 makers. This data (excluding images) has been released into the public domain and is available for you to utilise within this hackathon. A question we’d like to pose is: what relationships can we draw from our collections to everyday life? Visual culture is all around us — and we can see echoes of how visual culture appears in daily life within the M+ Collections in surprising and chance experiences.

Please note: Images won’t be released into the public domain, as the majority of copyright remains with our artists. However, we see this as an opportunity rather than a challenge, to be creative with how participants can represent objects. Read more about how copyright affects our open access approach.

Sign up now!

Join as an individual or as a team of up to four by signing up here. No coding required!

About M+ Hackathons

M+ held its inaugural hackathon in 2018 and the second hackathon in 2019. Through the 2018 and 2019 hackathon editions, we shared the museum’s open access programme with wider audiences and celebrated the launch of the M+ Collections Beta website. Hackathon teams utilised the M+ open data set as raw material and presented a multitude of projects, ranging from data visualisation and experience design to games and artistic works. Impressed by participants’ creativity and passion, we are committed to our goal of engaging with Hong Kong’s creative communities despite the current challenges.