Just Design(ing a Community)
I was sitting in my dorm room when one of my friends brought up the idea of attending our local hackathon. Being the odd one out in a room full of computer science students, I was the first to opt-out. “I’m not that into coding that I would want to do it for 24 hours straight,” I said. However, after some persuasion and food bribes, I found myself packing my things and preparing to spend the night in a random building of our school surrounded by people with some amazing ideas and lots of caffeine.
What sounded like my worst nightmare turned out to be a pivotal point in my design journey. I made my first web prototype in Figma at 2 A.M. that night. I like to think that was the moment I knew I wanted to be a designer, but I also think I may have been a little too delirious to be thinking that far ahead.
The only downfall of the 36-hour event was the imposter syndrome that followed it. As a designer, I felt like the black sheep in a crowd of engineers and programmers. While waiting in line to get into the event a fellow mutual quite literally stopped to ask me why I was even at the event. And so I started thinking if hackathons were made for hacking, then why not make a designathon for designing?
I’m definitely not saying we were the first to imagine doing such a thing (design sprints have been around for a while), but we decided it was time for UC Santa Cruz to host our own as well.
- Find a School to Host with
The first step on my checklist to making this event happen was finding a school to partner up with. Most university-level hackathons are standalone events hosted individually by each school, but I wanted this event to be different. The University of California system is well known for its various engineering programs. UC Santa Cruz is specifically known for having quite a tight-knit engineering community, however, we had no large scale events to bring our design community together. After speaking with other school organizations, we noticed this seemed to be an issue across the board at UC schools, and what better way to bring us together than to host an event for all university students. After exchanging some calls and “we’ll keep in touch” emails with organizations that didn’t seem to keep in touch, we finally stumbled across UC Davis Design Interactive (DI), a noteworthy organization with the same passion and drive for community building as us. They seemed like the perfect match to host an event with.
2. Finding a Cause
Quite shortly after talking with UCD’s Design Interactive, we established that we wanted to make sure our event wasn’t just something to add to your Linkedin, but that it had a deeper cause and meaning. Since all of us involved were passionate about social justice and empowerment, we decided that we wanted to run a fundraiser for a local grassroots organization, The Black Organizing Project, to empower designers to use their skills to create for social justice.
3) The actual hard part of organizing…. organizing
We were planning this on a pretty strict time constraint. From my experience working on different hackathon teams before, the norm was to leave at least 4–5 months of planning the nitty-gritty details and making sure everything was set to go. However, like the rest of our event, this was another aspect we did a little differently. We started planning in July with roughly 2 months till our tentative event day being the September 18–20th weekend. As time was closing in on us, we had some serious work to do.
For the next 2 months, we participated in numerous zoom calls with countless meeting agendas, pre-meeting agendas, and spreadsheets of tasks. Luckily with the combined efforts of the DI and CTD officers, several late-night work sessions, and 12 agenda scheduling documents, we were able to push through and make sure everything was ready for the event.
4) The Big Day
I spent most of the morning of the day of the event checking over everything we had to do, rehearsing my lines in my head, and pacing around my house. I’ve always enjoyed hosting events and public speaking, but this event felt a little different, a little special. In the last couple of minutes before the event, I started doing a quick meditation before the clock struck 5 pm and the event began.
5) Okay, but what now?
With some talented speakers, judges, workshop hosts, and over 140 attendees, the event was a success. We brought a community together, raised money for a local organization, and had fun designing. But what now? It’s been 2 months since the event ended and why am I writing about it now?
I have honestly spent a lot of time after the event reflecting and trying to figure out what I wanted to share in this article. I didn’t want to write something for the sake of writing and be unnecessarily cheesy. However, after carefully reflecting, I wanted to share my key takeaway from hosting this event. Above everything, this event has taught me how to take being a designer past (just) designing screens for an app and seeing the bigger picture and the impact I could make.
I thought hosting this event would maybe help me find a couple of people to geek out about fonts with, but it’s instead helped me find people who are passionate about using their skills to design for a cause, and I think that’s 100 times better.
