Learning from Collaborative Integration

The Hackathon as Design Charrette

Bara Safarova1, Edna Ledesma2, Gregory Luhan3, Stephen Caffey4,Cecilia Giusti51,2,4,5Texas A&M University 3Texas A&M University / University of Kentucky1,2{Barasafa|ednaledesma}@tamu.edu 3gregory.luhan@uky.edu4,5{scaffey|cgiusti}@arch.tamu.edu

This paper examines the application of innovative and interdisciplinarycollaboration methods that emerged from the rapidly developing field ofinformation technology and its intersection within the realm of design andarchitecture. These events, also referred to as hackathons, have risen inpopularity in recent years (Artiles & Wallace, 2013) and stem from a designresponse for the increasing demand for accelerated design decisions within thefield of architecture. This paper examines the potential of hackathons as aplatform for rapid development of design ideas into prototypes within a timeconstraint of 24 hours. The paper explores the hackathon as a robustfoundational element for pedagogical approaches rooted in interdisciplinarycollaboration. Using a case-study research methodology, this paper probes theframework of the event, the outcomes, and the lessons learned. As this paperdemonstrates, the hackathon required participants to identify and explore shiftingterritories through interdisciplinary teamwork to arrive at innovative solutions.In this setting, the format of the hackathon serves as a vibrant territory thatenables a concrete theoretical contribution to design pedagogy, CAAD education,and collaborative professional practice.

Keywords: Design tools, Digital design, Collaborative design, Datamanipulation

INTRODUCTIONThis paper examines the application of innova-tive and interdisciplinary collaboration method thatemerged from the rapidly developing field of in-formation technology and its intersection with therealm of design and architecture pedagogy. Thepaper presents an experimental application of a

hackathon, that is tested within the realm of designdiscourseonbothdesignandnon-design students tofoster new ways of thinking about design and com-munication through a time-critical activity. This pa-per presents the results as lessons for teaching whenusing this new application of an existing tool.

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Application of Hackathon to designThe framework of hackathon event is typically setwithin tight time constraints and has largely beentested and used within the computer science realm.Recently, this format has been deployed in non-technological industries such as architecture and de-sign (Safadi, 2014). With its emphasis on informationtechnology, the hackathon format provides a plat-form for engaging with big data, which are increas-ingly relevant in the construction industry.

What is a Hackathon?'Hackathon' has its roots in 'hacking' and 'marathon'in the computer science context where 'hacking'does not imply breaking into forbidden territory, butrather rapid prototyping for tangible solutionswithina limited amount of time - typically 24 hours. Theformat of a hackathon has been appropriated forcommercial, educational and civic purposes in re-cent years (Artiles & Wallace, 2013). For example,governments have utilized Civic Hackathons to ac-tively link mobile application developers to citizensin an effort to increase transparency and citizen-government relationships (Nath, 2011). Hackathons,have risen in popularity in recent years (Artiles &Wal-lace, 2013) with experimental application stemmingfrom a design response for the increasing demandfor accelerated design decisions within the field ofarchitecture. Events such as BIMStorms and Desig-nathon are two examples of an intersection betweenhackathons and the field of design and architecture.

DesignathonThe termDesignathon has been coined by Jessica Ar-tiles and David Wallace (2013) as they supplementedthe 'traditional' hackathonwith additional topics andexpanded the audience to include designers as wellas coders. The 39 hours Education Designathon in-cluded three categories Hands-On Learning, DigitalLearning, and Systems Re-Thinking and yielded amixof digital and analogue prototypes (Artiles &Wallace,2013) and demonstrated the possibility of applyinghackathon format to design problems.

BIMStormBIMStorm is a "massive Real-Time" live charretteof designers and consultants who collaborate re-motely through "open standards based exchanges"on projects using large databases and model servers("About BIMStorm," 2012). Kimon Onuma pioneeredBIMStorms when collaborating on projects world-wide during the mid 90s (Onuma, 2008). Based onthe idea that proprietary formats will become a hin-drance to collaborative, interdisciplinary design inthe architecture field, some scholars (Onuma, 2008;Kemp, 2011; Counsell, 2012) argue that focus onknowledge and process of data exchange will be-come central in the future of the industry. The argu-ment provides a fertile ground for the explorations ofintersection between computer science and designplatforms such as BIMStorms, Designathons.

Design Charrette 'light'The traditional Design Charrette stems from the lastminute finishing of architecture drawings at the 19thcentury École des Beaux-Arts in Paris (Smith, 2012).The Charrette is typically used for engagement ofkey stakeholders and experts to produce a visionor an implementation plan for a large project withpotential for contention and requiring communityengagement (Smith, 2012). Time constraint servesboth as a decision accelerator and a risk (associatedwith lengthy consultation period) reduction mech-anism (Smith, 2012). The competition format of aHackathon lifts theburdenof accountability and con-sensus building and allows participants to explorenovel ideas and innovate without the burden of de-livery or failure within a short period of time.

Hackathon as common platform for earlydesignThe potential of hackathon format as a collabora-tive common platform for manipulation of relevantlarge databases in the early stage of design is thecontribution of this research paper. The Collegeof Architecture at Texas A&M University hosted a24-hour hackathon where computer science, non-design and design students were exposed to the tra-

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ditional architecture/design environment, mentor-ship and tools to address a contemporary issue. Thefollowing sections describe the planning, process,participation, outcomesand lessons learned fromtheevent. The hackathon ultimately served as an inte-grative mechanism for enabling design discourse formultidisciplinary participants.

DIVERSITY OPEN DATA HACKATHON 2014Architecture programs across the nation find them-selves at a synergistic and inclusive intersection-acrossroads that links academic excellence to issuesrelated to diversity and equity. The goal of thisdiversity-based, data-driven hackathon was to ad-vance diversity awareness at Texas A&M University(College Station, TX) by identifying, collecting, andmaking visible a range of characteristics such as- eth-nic backgrounds, religious beliefs, age, political be-liefs, socioeconomic status, sexual orientations, phys-ical ability and gender-in ways that embrace the rich-ness of variety. Embedded is thus a shift beyond stan-dard charts, graphs, and statistics to contextualizedata throughmultimedia, three-dimensional objectsand graphic representation. The format of DiversityOpen Data (DOD) hackathon was used and basedupon the ethos of transparency and collaboration.The hackathon centers on the creation of a flexibleframework for active immersion of non-designers,computer scientists and designers in a multivalentdesign process dealing with evaluation and assess-ment of large data sets, followed by application ingraphic, data driven or three-dimensional format.This approach generates meaningful, clear, and tan-gible data visualization tools that prepare studentsfor envisioningnew linkages in subsequent curricularactivities. This study demonstrated the potential thehackathon format has as a translatable framework forreframing data into actionable ideas that align witharchitectural pedagogy.

Problem definitionThe concept of diversity is rooted in the contempo-rary cultural imperative of inclusivity. One challenge

posed by demonstrating inclusivity, however, is thatincluding awide range of aspects, facets, and charac-teristics of a population, also increases the difficultyof recognizing uniqueness, difference, or an individ-ual's contribution to a specific area of study. This is-sue becomes even more amplified once the bound-aries of a given system extend beyond the local con-text and taps into an even more diverse global con-text.

Planning and PartnershipsThe College of Architecture Diversity Council at TexasA&M University partnered with the Center for theStudyofDigital Libraries todeliver theDiversityOpenData Hackathon. The interdisciplinary steering com-mittee worked to customise Hackathon format toa wider, multi-disciplinary audience including stu-dents of computer science, engineering, liberal artsand design disciplines. The wide ranging audiencerequired an establishment of a network of commit-ted mentors, who were willing to advise participantson variousmethods of visualization, handling of dataand the topic of diversity. The event leveraged per-sonnel resources from all departments of the collegeof architecture, geography, computer science, col-lege of liberal arts and local business incubator.

Hybridizing dataThe expansion of the hackathon platform to otherdesign and non-design disciplines required the pro-vision of source data in formats that would allow forrapid analysis and manipulation with and withoutcoding capabilities. Hence publicly accessible datarelated to diversity collectedby Texas A&MUniversitywere made available to participants in two versions:reference data: 'human readable' graphs and tablesraw data for coding: 'comma-separated-values CSVfiles All data were stored in an on-line git-hub repos-itory. Sample data were made available within a callfor participants one month prior to the event. Thedata used for DiversityOpenDataHackathonwere allpublicly available data as part of open data ("What isOpen?, " 2014) movement. Table 1 below shows datasources for all datamadeavailable to theparticipants.

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Table 1Data and sourcesmade available toparticipants.

The hackathon mechanism, transforming pools ofdata through coding and/or hacking, proved to be auseful platform to encourage participation at a vari-ety of scales. It also provided the creative environ-ment of celebrating the design-oriented "culture ofmaking" that when properly calibrated, gave the par-ticipants invaluable insights on managing a range ofcomplex data sets and enabling tangible products.

Figure 1Space claimed by aHackathon teamwas turned into aprivatemultifunctional lab.Image credit [ByAuthor].

Description of the eventTheDiversity OpenData (DOD) hackathon took placeover an intensive 24-hour period in April 2014. Thecentral challenge delivered to participants was thatwhile diversity is meant to include a variety of as-pects, facets and characteristics of the population,its actual "measurement" is commonly simplified viatwo variables: race/ethnicity and gender/sex. Partic-ipants were first tasked with imagining reliable alter-

native metrics to measure diversity in a more com-plex and sophisticated manner. The second chargewas how to visually represent such metrics; indeed,the expectation was for participants to transcendconventions of graphic representation and to pro-pose innovative ideas. The DOD was loosely dividedinto three phases: team-building activities; brain-storming and production (see Figure 1); and exhibi-tion/showcase of alternatives/outcomes. The com-petition venue included classrooms, studios, fabri-cation facilities, computer laboratories, galleries andcommon areas in a university building housing theCollege of Architecture. Team-building activitieswere facilitated to increase team multidisciplinar-ity. To better support and encourage active engage-ment, a team of mentors was created with definedskills. To further stimulatediscussion and toprovide afirst-hand experience in crossing disciplinary bound-aries, teamswere required todemonstrate some typeof diversity within their ranks; teams were incen-tivized to assemble groups with the highest degreesof diversity (Figure 2 shows selected team charac-teristics) as defined by each team in its own terms.In summary, the key learning objectives of the DODhackathon event included: engaging students, fac-ulty, staff and the wider community in a discussionabout diversity; visualizing publicly available data ofthe Texas A&M University as related to diversity; pro-viding a platform for free expression through designlanguage, and to provide experience working in di-verse collaborative teams.

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Figure 2Characteristics ofteams whoparticipated in thefinal 'Show and Tell'

Event statisticsFifty-six undergraduate and graduate students par-ticipated in the Hackathon. Majority of studentswere from colleges of Engineering and Education,the rest of students were from Liberal Arts, Businessand Architecture colleges. Thoughwidely advertisedwithin and hosted by the College of Architecture,only two students from the college participated inthe hackathon. Factors that may have contributedto this lowparticipation include the prohibitive time-intensiveness of architecture design studio projects,design studio instructor restrictions on participationand/or a misinterpretation of the term "hackathon"vis-à-vis coding/programming. This gave the plan-ning team an opportunity to assess the hackathonformat as a tool for teaching beginning design,since a substantial majority of the participants hadnever enrolled in a design studio. The composi-tion of twelve teams participating in the competitionranged from homogeneous to semi-diverse by themetrics mentioned in the previous section.

HackathonOutcomesThe formation and work of the twelve teams, alongwith thediscussionwith thementors, resulted in a va-

rietyof outcomes (seeFigures3, 4, 5), whichwerepre-sented to and judged by an ad-hoc panel of judges.Prizes were awarded based on overall rating, bestunderstanding of diversity, team diversity, and mostcreative as voted by the event organizers and men-tors. One exemplary observation expressed duringone team's presentation is the fact that though indi-viduals' differences are typically perceived to be sig-nificant, the human genetic composition differs onlyby a mere 0.1% among individuals. In tension withthis reality of a miniscule difference is the perplex-ity of perceptions of the things that define our dif-ferences. For many of the teams, the process of re-defining diversity was achieved through a two-stepprocess: 1) quantification of particular cultural or so-cial trends, and2) anextrapolationofdata throughanadditive or subtractive process. Cultural variables an-alyzed included things suchasnumberof spoken lan-guages, while social trends analyzed included thingssuch as social media usage. The teams learned thatsimply stating a variable quantity could unintention-ally induce a marginalization of the differences.

Figure 3Still image from aData DrivenDocument (D3)presentation by theInfolabelers team.Image credit [ByInfolabelers team].

Figure 4Still images and aphotograph of datadriven document(D3) visualization ofthe composition ofTexas A&MUniversity studentpopulation percolleges anddepartments.Image credit [BySantanu andFriends team].

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Figure 5Image stills from amobile application.The app matchespeople on campuswho have the leastin common andgenerates apostcard for themto post. Imagecredit [By ThreeAmigos and aFriend team].

Role ofmentorsMentors played a crucial role in overcoming the dif-ficulty of team building across disciplines. Sixteenmentors took part in facilitating the event: faculty,graduate students and staff members from the Col-lege of Architecture, Multicultural studies; New Me-dia, Religion and Digital Studies; Geography; theCenter for the Study of Digital Libraries, and profes-sional mentors from the technology incubator andlocal businesses. The intent of the mentor recruit-ment process was to maximize diversity among thementors to reflect the diversity of disciplinary ex-pertise and to share a broad array of ideas with theteams. Mentoring techniques varied from helpingthe team define realistic boundaries to developinga formative common vocabulary that could be de-ployed by the team to steward active engagementthrough a critical thought process. In this context thementor served as a "collaborative critic" who bridgedbetween concepts and the means to enable them.Consequently, the role of the mentor is defined bythree modes of operation: as enabler-enabling theteams to help the team narrow down their ideas toa few key concepts; as strategist-developing a strat-egy or tactic for examining the data; and as stage-topose questions and from which the team could self-configure a strategy for presenting their findings in ashort amount of time. While characterizing their par-

ticipation as intense and invigorating, most mentorswished that they could have spent more time at thehackathon event. In subsequent feedback question-naire, mentors conveyed that the format was a cre-ative mode of teaching that could be incorporatedinto classroompractice. The format of the hackathonallowed mentors to float between teams, participat-ing in conversations through various modes of inter-action. This floating enabledmentors to remain nim-ble, monitoring teams through a variety of stages ofdesign processes. In reviewing the approach that ledthem to thewinningdesign solution,members of thefirst-place team cited questions posed and sugges-tions made by one of the architectural design stu-dio professor mentors and the architectural histo-rianmentor as triggering the shift in perspective thatpushed them past the limits of their collective disci-plinary expertise.

Figure 6Photo of an audiopresentationaccompanied bychanging gradientsof color “Whatcould you see if youdidn’t look fordiversity?” by thePaco-Taco team.Image credit [ByAuthor].

LESSONS LEARNED &MOVING FORWARDWith a theoretical grounding in activity theory, thehackathon format enables a deep dive into a partic-ular topic, inspires teamwork and collaboration, andtriggers the imagination within a constrained timeperiod. Aligning the topic of diversity to teaching, re-search, and service-intrinsic components of the aca-demic setting-enhanced student learning and com-munity engagement. Hackathon participants foundthat attempting to define the complexities of diver-sity through a parameter-based solution was initially

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perceived as limited or limiting and that it was not aneasy task. One team posed a question that perhapswas the most compelling answer to the challenge:"What do you see if you don't look for diversity?" (seeFigure 6). Allowing differences to be defined by twovariables was perceived to be archaic, simplistic andtoo limited; and accepting that difference exists is thefirst step in redefining the term. Ultimately, the teamarrived at three key observations: first, one can utilizedata from a variety of contexts and align seeminglyparallel issues through creative visualization; second,by viewing topics such as diversity from multiplevantages, previously unknown patterns can emerge;third, platforms such as the hackathon enable bothself and collective discovery at a variety of scales. Asoneof thementors noted themost valuable aspect ofthe hackathon formatwas "triggering the shift in per-spective that pushed each student teampast the lim-its of their collective disciplinary expertise." As an ed-ucational tool, the DOD hackathon was shown to bea reliable and versatile outlet for design-driven cre-ativity. The 24-hour time constraint allowed for an in-tense stimulation of innovative thinking, much like inan architectural design studio charrette. The subver-sive stimulation of thework environmentwaswell re-ceived, including non-design students. In this sense,thehackathon is also anoperativemechanism-anop-timization toolkit-comparable tomore complex algo-rithms that design students usually encounter later inthe curriculum-such as uncertainty analysis and sen-sitivity analysis-that allow collaborative design teamsto craft optimal solutions within a given boundaryof constraints. The competitive environment frus-trated, challenged, and ultimately, inspired teamsto think beyond their perceived capabilities. Drivenby a sense of ownership and pride in the outputof their analyses, participants from non-design dis-ciplines were able to experience one of the typicalrewards of the design studio environment. One ofthementors noted her excitement of participating inthe "Google-like atmosphere" when she "saw a lot oflight bulbs go on in people's minds." Finally, the pre-sentation of the outcomes enriched the individual

and team experience, creating new levels of synergyamong team members, regardless of homogeneityor heterogeneity in team composition. At the timeof this submission, the research team is developingan interdisciplinary grant proposal and will be part-neringwith the Texas A&MUniversity to bring severalof the workshop platforms to fruition. By providingfunding to jumpstart the research, the teams will beable to transform their hackathon research into appsand visualizations.

CONCLUSIONSFraming the hackathon experience with issues of di-versity challenged students in a variety of ways. First,confronting the definition of diversity challenged theassumptions of students who had not, in general,questioned this concept in a profound and complexway. Second, the restrictive time frame generated anartificial burden that resulted in a heightened senseof urgency. Third, the event location (unfamiliar tomost participants) was, in the end, an equalizing ele-ment: the venue meant that most participants wereequally out of their comfort zone. Mentors catalyzedanticipated successes in the formation of the teamsand through encouraging complex discussions ondata interpretation as well as search strategies thatled to more complex data sources. In combination,these elements seem an innovative pedagogical toolwith potential for design studio applications. Bygenerating creative thinking and by forcing partici-pants from comfort zones (spatially, temporally, so-cially and culturally) event organizers generated newrealms of conceptual exploration. In conclusion, theDiversity Open Data hackathon promises to be an ef-fective tool for stimulating critical thinking and self-efficacy in the beginning design process. Further,within a restrictive time frame, students left empow-ered by a high level of design freedom and first-handknowledge of the intricacies of disciplinary accultur-ation. Incentivized by rewards for creativity ratherthan for course credit, students felt motivated to ac-cess untapped intellectual resources and unexploredareas of scholarly imagination. Students hesitant to

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pursue open-ended problems were ultimately ableto activate realms of learning beyond their comfortzones.

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