Hack your Reality
Thanks to UAL’s Activating The Sites fund, I was able to co-host a 3-day hackathon (intensive art + tech workshop) at Camberwell where students learnt the basics of Augmented Reality (AR) and how it has been used for activism and storytelling to make the world a better place and use it as a tool for social good.
This Hackathon was open to all CCW students and staff and encouraged multi-disciplinary and cross-course collaboration through ideating, design-thinking exercises, developing and presenting an augmented reality prototype by the end of the Hackathon.
https://www.arts.ac.uk/students/stories/open-call-hack-your-reality
UAL Guiding policies
This hackathon addresses guiding policy 1 and guiding policy 3 in the
following ways:
There were no existing permanent Augmented Reality (AR) workshops at UAL, and technical courses tended to focus too much on the tool, rather than empowering students to use creative tech as a tool to tackle social issues. Additionally, there was a large ethnicity and gender gap in the tech industry, and a workshop was needed to introduce and allow a range of students to access creative technology in a collaborative way.
The Hackathon offered students creative professional development by teaching them a new software and empowering them to apply it within their interests while focusing on a social issue, such as racial inequality, climate change, and sustainability. Students explored the creative tech tool of AR through the lens of storytelling and activism, and they were encouraged to use AR as a way to imagine a better future, open up a dialogue or raise awareness on issues they were passionate about.
The Hackathon enabled students from underrepresented backgrounds to use AR to highlight an issue or topic that was not spoken about in the mainstream, providing an opportunity for the wider public to learn and be aware of less mainstream perspectives from different cultures. Learning and being able to use AR was an in-demand skill that increased employability, and the impact was seen first-hand during one of the workshops when a workshop participant posted their AR filter prototype on their Instagram and got asked to do a paid commission, which they completed by the end of the day.
A key component of the Hackathon was collaboration and working cross-disciplinary, and that was a skill that was highly sought after within the creative industry. Looking at activism and using creativity was a huge influence in the Hackathon, from the references shared with the students to doing (un)conscious bias exercises to empower them to be more considerate of the design decisions they made.
The Hackathon ended with a presentation, giving students a great opportunity to pitch and present their idea to an audience and industry experts, which was a necessary skill in the industry.