A four day Hackathon took the Drifteam off the beaten track this April, aligning digital design with on-the-ground action, resulting in a new web-app prototype ROAM.
As a remote studio, we place a high value on authentic partnerships and meaningful collaborations, bringing together our digital designers, creative operations, and communications team to deliver people-driven and planet-focused projects with ambitious clients worldwide.
Whilst working internationally has its perks, we decided to have a full team sign off from client work for a week, trading our day-to-day practice to focus on a campaign that has crossed our paths a fair few times: the Right to Roam.
The Right to Roam (opens in a new window) is a fantastic project – an established campaign with a healthy public backing calling for easy access to open space across the UK and beyond. With recent coverage in the news about the racialisation of green space (opens in a new window) and our entitlement to exist outside freely, the Right to Roam is a present and pressing issue, and a very real challenge that the Drifteam were keen to tackle head on.
Taking on issues that have a political and personal legacy attached to them carries with it challenges that can take many decades to deconstruct and rebuild into a healthy and productive framework ready for on-the-ground action. Whilst four days won’t fix foundations or re-write history, our week-long Hackathon was an intensive, collaborative experiment that explored the potential of sprint-mindset and rapid results – what can a burst of energy and focus from a dedicated team produce? And could it be a springboard for real solutions?
We structured our Hackathon over our four day week, using a sprint process to shape our project, with some of our own added improvisation and experimentation.
We jump started the week framed by the question of, “How might we?”, exploring everything from the potential of how we could engage with decision makers to facilitate an open dialogue, to how we could make it easier for roamers to connect with their community both on and offline. These questions fed into a workshop deconstructing risks and assumptions, aligning our research and individual interests in accessibility and the oppression rooted in land ownership with how we might integrate AR geotagging with litter-picking, tree identification, and even exploring the complex world of cartography.
We began our second day with a “Gathering” activity, heading off to collect examples of digital interfaces that could be a useful reference or rough solution. We sourced inspiration from platforms like Duolingo, Shazam, and Nike Run Club for their clear data visualisation and motivating gamification, with some of the team getting their thoughts down on paper to help translate ideas off the screen. We wrapped day two with Crazy Eights, each heading off to draw eight potential structures and frameworks and bringing them together to formulate a plan for our next phase.
Day three started with storyboarding, with each of the team drawing up potential user flows and experiential journeys. We were left with an eclectic collection of rough routes, and a whole host of visuals exploring interface options and directions. Together we spent some time unpacking where we could go with our choice of words and copy options, completing our penultimate day with a series of actions and setting the scene for our final day; the build!
The final day and a fresh Figma board led to some fruitful collaboration between our in-house creative communications, operations and our resident designers, resulting in ROAM; a new, well-equipped web-app co-created by the Drifteam. In its essence, ROAM is a tool for on-the-ground exploration, advocacy, and action, drawing together elements of all our ideas to deliver something accessible and meaningful, staying true to its inspiration; the Right to Roam.
Following our Hackathon, we held a retrospective to reflect on the week, a productive session exploring the challenges we faced and the opportunity for improvement when it comes to process, project, and progress. Have a read below of our key takeaways.
Within our nifty team, we have a huge cross-section of interests, skills, and areas of expertise, making for a perfect exchange of ideas and inspirations. By bringing the non-designers into the full scope of the creative process, there’s now a broader understanding of the journey from idea to outcome, giving our ops team clarity around communicating the creative process both internally and with clients.
Something we would include in future Hackathons would be a roadmap detailing actions and priorities to help clarify outcomes and make it easier for the team to work independently. Using platforms beyond Figma and Slack will help to build a fuller scope of the project – tools like Notion provide vital support to our internal systems and client work, ideal for collaboration, communication, and co-creation.
Our time and client commitments created some challenges during the Hackathon, with a lot of the team splitting their extra workload around our daily calls and catch-ups. For future collaborative projects, we’ll plan further ahead of time to manage full sign-offs from client work for a team-wide immersive week.
The sprint method spans a full five day week instead of our 34 hours over four days – for next time we are considering shorter days over five days to align more closely with the structure, checking in with our team’s other commitments to make sure they’re not working overtime! The fifth day provided time for testing and QA, a great opportunity for final touches.
Working as a team with two all-hands workshops each day was an exercise in intensive team-led collaboration – it was at once enriching and exhausting, but overall an unusual chance to make decisions as a creative team over client wishes. ROAM bypassed the traditionally tech-based coding event that Hackathons are so often thought of as, instead connecting IRL issues with achievable digital design solutions.
Having seen what just four days can achieve, we want to see what the next steps might be for the future of ROAM. What could the next iteration look like? A fresh, forward-thinking reinvention of existing ideas and new inspiration could springboard our prototype into a fully-fledged solution, bringing ROAM to life; from digital Hackathon to a live reality.
Our focus as a Drifteam will be different to other groups – be it a cohort of developers or a team of trespassers, we’re curious to hear what your call to arms is. Redefining ROAM’s goals to capture the full scope of the campaign could be the next vital step in articulating ambitions and aligning forces to help realise a new iteration.
Good intentions lead to great outcomes. At the core of ROAM is an initiative powered by people who love the planet, and we believe the project should never deviate from that core purpose. We’d love to learn more about how we can connect communities and tap into existing networks working hard behind the scenes to push the project to its full potential.
We’ve created a case study for ROAM (opens in a new window), archiving our week’s work into a neat digital snapshot for future teams to iterate on from our ideas. Collaboration generates new, exciting, and innovative thoughts – we’d love to pass the baton on, and invite new teams to take ROAM to the next phase of impact.
Are you interested in kicking off your own team Hackathon or want to take ROAM to the next stage? Let’s continue the conversation! Get in touch with us hello@driftime.com 🤸
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