After a rich breakfast, we came back to SZOIL to continue the challenging humanitarian hackathon. The transfer in taxi made the whole day easier and we reached the place in great shape. We soon started to work on our projects: the first step was to build a storyboard, which consisted in cartoon-like drawings, showing the application of our devices, as can be seen below.
Working on the storyboard..not an easy job!
We discovered that drawing real-life situations is far from being easy, and often the results were catastrophic at the beginning. However, after a few trials, all the teams managed to produce nice and explanatory drawings.
Storyboard
The following step was to define the details of our devices, fitting them back in the storyboard and iterating these steps until a working and complete set of specification was defined. After this, a good lunch helped us relaxing a bit and enjoying the nice weather of the day. Soon after the lunch, we started to build our prototypes: this was probably the most creative part of the day, where teams tried to find different materials and bizarre solutions for their projects. Crutches made of Chinese lego-like pieces, modelling clay used to build a dynamic bracelet, a smartphone app to show how to read a patient tag, wooden marionettes and hand-cut paper full of QR codes and many other cool solutions came to life. Art was in the air!
Caution, Creativity at work!
Once again a Skype session with the ICRC experts where each team had 5 minutes to present its device and receive feedback. The experts were quite amazed by the results and expressed their interest by announcing that they will try to implement our ideas!
ICRC experts on Skype
Time to relax with a chinese aperitif full of strange but delicious food and finally go party!
Blogpost by LN and IC.