How to Hack Your Office
How we hacked our Chicago Build Center with 10 Smart Office prototypes in about 24 hours
The amount of clever technology we’re surrounded by in this day and age is pretty remarkable.
Smart speakers, apps, wearables, new connected gadgets coming out seemingly every day — it’s as if every time we turn around there’s a new solution to a problem we might not have even realized we had. And as citizens of this new gadget-fueled era, many have been bitten by the smart home bug and decked out their homes with such modern conveniences as smart lights, thermostats, doorbells, and internet connected baby monitors — all commanded by voice-activated, virtual assistants. What a time to be alive!
But, while there’s still plenty of room for innovation and improvement in the home, there remains yet another frontier with perhaps an even more intricate and varied set of under-served problems: The office.
The constant battle for bookable meeting space, the epic search for the desk of someone you’ve never visited, or the never-ending hunt for the right office supplies (or, let’s be honest, snacks). There’s got to be a better way! Sure, there are some companies playing in the space (primarily around conference rooms), but every organization’s needs are a little bit different, making universal solutions to certain types of problems difficult to find and deploy.
With a bit of creativity, some foundational engineering skills, and the right kind of DIY instincts, this all adds up to make the office fertile ground for some serious hacking.
Breaking in a new space
Last year, our Chicago Build Center was about to add our 200th Builder, and we needed a new space. We packed up and moved to the 38th floor of Chicago’s Aon Center. Our office build team had done an incredible job with the new space, and we were thrilled to move in. Eager new tenants, teams had pre-booked recurring meeting rooms, arrived early for a welcome breakfast, and snapped photos of the new space and view of Millennium Park.
After settling in to team spaces and retraining ourselves not to autopilot our morning commute to the doorstep of our former office building (it’s right next door), our new space was pretty much home. But it was still missing that certain personal touch.
Our previous space had become home to a number of hacks we’d built, like conference room sensors to detect room squatting or no-shows, and a web app that would indicate just how “occupied” the bathrooms were before you left your desk (no, really). So, to really make this new space our own, we were also going to have to hack it.
As hackathon settings go, the office environment is sort of a uniquely gratifying problem space because the majority of us spend most of our days in the Build Center, working closely with our teams to solve problems for our clients. So, as regular inhabitants of the space, that makes us both the creators and the users of any hack we build and deploy.
“The user personas are us and our guests. And that makes it really fun to try out new ideas and continuously improve on what we build.” -Office Hacker
Having settled into our new space, it was time to have a Hackathon…
Step 1: Ideate
We invited everyone in the office to our new event space, where ideas came together over food, beverages, whiteboards, and lots of markers. Some were just plain silly, which is half the fun, and others had real potential.
“What if we had an API that could tell us when the plants need water?”
“What if we had a chat room alert whenever the Dishwasher was finished running?”
“What if I had an Augmented Reality app on my phone that could tell me what was in all these Kitchen Drawers??”
Now this might be a little bit of a unique problem, but it turns out that once you get everyone in a product engineering org thinking about how to solve their personal pet peeve with technology, you wind up needing a backlog management tool, quick! If you’re in a similar situation, you probably already have a favorite tool for this. For our purposes, an Atlassian Confluence space for teams to form and collaborate did just the trick.
Step 2: Prep
For this hackathon, we had plenty of newcomers to the “Internet of Things” space that would need a primer. It definitely helps to have a few pros around who can show everyone how to connect sensors and buttons up to the internet, and thankfully we have an active IoT Community in our Chicago Build Center that helped get everyone up to speed.
But even without similar in-house expertise, there are a few good places to start: Check out the Raspberry Pi, a low-cost, single-board computer, or the Arduino, a programmable microcontroller, each with loads of expansion components available in the form of “shields” or “hats” that bolt right on to add various capabilities. There are some great resources and beginner projects to get started with both, as well as general help with electronics, at PiMyLifeUp and Adafruit, which also sell loads of sensors and other devices to turn just about any idea you have into a reality.
One uncommon resource we’re especially lucky to have in our new office is an IoT Lab room, complete with 3D Printer and a host of spare parts. While such a dedicated space is certainly optional, it provided us the perfect backdrop for regular office hours to help teams get going, while a team-wide bootcamp helped get everyone up to speed on Arduino development.
Don’t forget the “I” in IoT
What’s an Internet of Things, without the Internet? An easily overlooked necessity, make sure your office WiFi is friendly to IoT devices. Many such devices have a hard time getting past WiFi authentication portals, which can be a real stumbling block. We worked with our IT department to make sure we had a solution in place that was both secure and streamlined for our event. (Thanks Kollen and Frank!)
Step 3: Hack
After a few weeks of groups forming around ideas, designs, and getting generally familiar with the tools they wanted to use, we had 10 teams ready to start hacking.
We kicked off Hack The Office 3.0 on a Thursday afternoon, with plenty of supplies and entertainment on hand to keep everyone fed and motivated. Teams could spend as much or as little time as they wanted over the next ~24 hours working on their hacks, with the only requirement being a demo of their prototypes the next day at noon before a small panel of judges.
Several teams stayed well into the night as they repeated a familiar cycle of hitting unexpected roadblocks, tinkering away at solutions, then having triumphant, late-night breakthroughs when all the pieces came together.
And Finally: Release the Hacks!
The following day, each team had something ready to show off and we invited the rest of the office to check out everyone’s prototypes. Here’s what we built!
The Hacks
- Lazy Drawer: A web-based Augmented Reality app using AR.js that shows you what’s in the kitchen drawers
- Loomanoh: A “brain wave” sensing EEG headband that controls the height of a standing desk with your mind (sort of)
- Packmule: A computer vision-based notification system for packages arriving in the mailroom
- Proximity: A heatmap of what parts of the office are most utilized, based on RF-trails of devices people are carrying around
- Staireo: A “sentiment-aware,” facial recognition system built on Azure Cognitive Services that plays a custom theme song from Spotify depending on your mood, when walking into our office from the stairs that connect our floors.
- Fun Police: An RFID, sensor-based system and dashboard that shows when a board game is in the game cabinet or checked out, and records stats on popular games
- ThirstyPlant: An API to let us know when office plants need water
- Dibs: A dashboard for after-hours events to see what games are being played in different rooms around the office, call “dibs” on the next round by waving a personal NFC tag, and a way to let the next person know it’s their turn by pressing a physical button
- Slackrs: Swift-based bot for Slack to track “karma,” and report on all sorts of smart office info like what’s on tap in the kitchen or what rooms are available for immediate booking
- BYOLocation: Bluetooth beacons built into nameplates to detect where in the office people are sitting, complete with chatbot to let you know!
We asked the demo audience and a small panel of judges to pick their favorites and awarded prizes to the top 3 teams (the last 3, above), each of which had built impressive solutions we thought we might really get some use.
All 10 teams had a great time hacking and had pushed the boundary on innovation, though, and that really was the measure of success.
Hackathons
It’s certainly a lot of fun to see novel solutions for sometimes silly problems come together around the office, but there are a whole host of reasons we love events like this.
We’re all busy. We work hard to solve important problems for our clients and we approach those problems with the kind focus and intensity they deserve. Taking a quick detour into a problem space with an open-ended solution offers a mental reset, flexes muscles for out-of-the-box thinking, and makes for a great occasion to experiment with tech we might consider using on a real project — like new languages and frameworks, or any of the constantly evolving services from AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud.
Just as importantly though, hackathons celebrate exactly the kind of collaboration, creativity, and just plain fun that are core parts of our culture at Slalom and are a familiar part of working in any of our Build Centers.
We had a great time tricking out our new office and continue to hack on several of the projects that spun out of it.
If any of this sounds like fun, or if you’d like to find out more about what we do, drop us a line. We’re also hiring and love meeting builders of all disciplines with a passion for creating new things.
Tim Knapp is a Software Engineering Practice Lead and Tech Culture champion in our Chicago Build center, which was awarded the Tech in Motion 2019 Timmy Award for Best Tech Work Culture in Chicago
Thanks to Sony Rusteberg, Carl Anderson, Sean Owiecki, Matt Wright, Ryan Bassler, Simon Griffeth, Ops, and the 50+ Builders in Chicago who helped break in our new space and contribute to this article
