IBM

Developer/UX Designer (2015 Nov—2015 Dec)

At Malmö

Contributed to the IBM Bluemix project. Bluemix is a cloudbased development platform as a service. Planned and hosted the first hackathon event of Openhack.

This is what the logo used to look like for Openhack.

This took place over the course of 7 weeks, where I took part in meetings where we presented our findings and work at the end of each week.

Most of the work focused on creating and catering towards the hackathon event. The last couple of weeks were also spent on understanding requirements for native/hybrid app development (and then later into coding Swift via Bluemix).

Some of the initial scenario storyboards to figure out some of the experience of the event.

As the brief intended different universities to compete with each other, an animated progress bar was implemented. It was also intended to be a friendly competition between Sweden and Denmark, as we were situated in the Greater Copenhagen / Øresunds region.

Overall the experience was positive. Some of the planning did not pan out for the competition itself, though I believe the brief should have been challenged earlier in terms of seeing what kind of interest each university involved had for such an endeavor. Knowing and understanding those limits would have garnered more involvement and activities that would have given more opportunities before and during the event.

The logistics for the event itself was very much rushed, and for that reason there was limited time in creating an experience which truly felt like there were incentives to compete (apart from being visible on the website). There was also something missing for the additional progress points (instead of just adding up sign-ups) during the run of the event to give it some extra spirit.

A few snapshots of the final iteration of the working prototype. It was also localized in Arabic and tutorials were made readily available as well.

In a way this event needed something like this only because it was experiencing it's first run (and needed to be successful from the get-go). The transformation and changes Openhack has gone through in the last few years has allowed it to be better situated for what it is today.

It was interesting to work at IBM and to see (during my time there) an early adoption to design thinking strategies and workshop meetings. I feel it was insightful to also experience what it is like to plan, host and later evaluate the undertaking of a hackathon.