#UAL Creative Hack 2023

[illustratorintheprocess]

WEEK 16: No Teaching Week - UAL Creative Hack

I won't spend 2 hours typing out every detail of all 3 days again. Sorry folks. It's gone. I will give you the briefest rundown possible:

3 Days - 3 Topics you could chose from (I chose Equality & Social Justice) - A Business Idea to be developed and Presentation to be held - £1500 to win

Day 1 : Monday

We got an introductory lecture and I had a pleasant chat with 2 students from different courses and colleges beforehand, very nice, very cool. Then we were put into rooms according to the topic we chose to speed-run through a bunch of exercises then we had to find groups. I was part of the left-overs group of people who didn't have enough time to chose a group. We were 7 people from different colleges, courses and with different specialties. We speed-ran through a bunch more team building exercise we had way too little time for, made a whatsapp group and that was day 1.

In the evening we texted ideas for the project topic via Whatsapp in the group.

Day 2: Tuesday

We had to descide between 3 project ideas:

- Knife Crime in London

- Housing Crisis

- Disability in everyday life

Personally I liked the last one best even if it wasn't my idea. Specifically the Knife Crime was held onto tightly by one of the other girls so we decided to take a few minutes to prepare a mini pitch for each other before deciding. We had also booked a timeslot with a mentor to stop by our table and help us so they joined our little decision making process. Knife Crime was tossed (2 girls wanted to do it but eventually supported our other idea). They offered to do the powerpoint presentation for the pitch to the judges on the 3rd day. We hashed out the details of our idea: it would be an app similar to googlemaps, yelp and tumblr where people w disabilities could check their route, rate venues and connect with their community over a variety of different topics, all in one place.

Big shock: we found a competitor app that does something similar already. Another mentor helped us to decide to keep at it anyway because we will set ourselves apart with the community aspect of our app + as second comers we can learn from the first one's mistakes and be better.

Funding: we talked about starting with a go-fund-me and partnering with charities, leading into paid partnerships with venues post-launch and the potential inclusion of a paid prime membership that comes with perks for the user

Day 3: Wednesday

The 2 people who liked knife crime better and said they'd do the powerpoint presentation called in sick, disqualifying themselves from the competition and leaving us with no presentation because turns out they did nothing the day before. The 5 of us remaining pulled together strong and came up with a name, a logo, an interface mock-up, financial plan, etc. Wee had 2 more mentor meetings and managed to get together a presentation in time for the pitch to the jury. There were 2 groups that seemed to be especially strong contestants. When we gave our presentation we ran out of time and didn't get through all our slides but we made up for it by answering all the joury's questions without problem. One of our team blamed herself for the fact we ran out of time during presenting and started crying but we reassured her she worked hard,did amazing and we don't blame her.

The judges took all presentations with them upstairs to make a decision. We waited downstairs drinking juice, chatting, hoping for 3rd place and taking group pictures together (one of us had to go early for a job interview but we'd tell her the results via Whatsapp).

The jusdges announced 3rd place - wasn't us.

They announced 2nd place - wasn't us.

We had no hopes of coming first.

They announced the 1st place - we didn't realize it was us.

Wee were told to stand up and come forth after we had kept seated for a good 10 seconds not realizing they meant us because thwy called us by the app name that had only existed for a few hours at that point. I shock cried. We shook people's hands, our picture was taken, we called our 5th member and she hurried back to meet us. When we were approached for an interview we left that honor to the person who had the idea of making it about the disabled community, the one who had the closest personal connection to the topic, the girl who thought she had botched the presentation when we was the one working the hardest. I called my boyfriend and told him we won. Then we waited for the interview to be done and caught up the 5th member on what had happened before going out for dinner together as a group. Insane.

The price money for first place was £1500 and since the other 2 girls had disqualified themselves this morning by not showing up we split the money 5 ways, meaning £300 for each of us. Not bad for 3 days work.

As a team of 5 we decided to try and peruse our idea with hopes of actually building the app and making it a reality.

[illustratorintheprocess]

WEEK 15: And on And on It goes

This week was a weird one. I was still tuckered out from the hustle of the weeks before and so I don't remember the details of the Monday group meeting, but I remember already being behind with the Major Project.

The official first brief had been 2 weeks ago and I had missed the Tuesday online classes with Chris because I was frantically writing the dissertation still. Luckily the Tuesday meetings were being recorded so I could catch up to them eventually.

On Monday however we were expected to have thought about possible topics for our big Final Major Project (FMP or MP) already. My brain was still swirling with the old projects. So I started with a simple mindmap of any interesting topics that came to mind:

The big 4 topics that came to mind were the global extinction event, the Ukraine-Russia conflict, the missing person cases of Native Americans and Cryptids.

During a group discussion with my tutor Maisie and 3 other people from my group both, the Ukraine-Russia conflict and the Native American topic turned out to be less promising. By talking through it with the others I realized the Ukraine-Russia topic might be too unpredictable in its development over the next few months to base a 60cred project on that's due in May. Who knows what would happen between the two countries by then and how it might affect my project. The topic of Native Americans I decided to scratch because eventhough I am personally really interested in learning more about the culture, languages and prosecution of Native Americans by settlers as well as in modern day, I am in the learning stages. And I can research a lot but might still run the danger of misrepresenting, misinforming or appropriating something and offending/hurting people with it. I'm white and need to be careful with how I show other people's cultures in my work. Something well meant could turn out to be a catastrophe if not researched properly or out of context and I wasn't ready to take that risk with the FMP.

Now deciding between the Global Extinction Event and Cryptids my tutor suggested I could merge the two topics into one idea. I might not have explained what Cryptids are well enough. (Honestly was super surprised when nobody in the group knew what I was talking about, even when I brought up examples like Nessie and Bigfoot) My tutor had the idea of "what cryptids would come out of a nuclear event/worsening of the climate crisis", which is a decent idea in itself i guess. But I had my even on reimagining cryptids and their place in our society in modern day when they can't hide anymore. The scary legends and folklore would become part of everyday life. So Mothman could be a window cleaner and the Fresno Nightcrawler a postman or something along those lines. The idea is cute but leaves a few open question marks of what roll in modern day society could a cannibalistic, vicious monster like the Wendigo have? I guess they could go vegan and do yoga?

The idea definitely needs work but I was happy to have found a start with the MP at least.

Annoyingly I seem to have lost my student ID. I've been using temporary passes to get in and out of uni but if I don't find it soon I will run out and have to make a new one. Annoying.

On a high note I was accepted into the UAL Creative Hack! It's a sort of competition I have applied to a while ago and completely forgotten about. During week 16, which is a no-teaching week, I will spend 3 days going to another college under the UAL umbrella and compete with other students from all sorts of courses for the prize money of the first place, which is £1500. No small thing. We will have to work in groups on one of 3 topics, which we chose in our application. Mine is social justice and equality. Very fitting considering my dissertation topic haha

For the rest of the week I took it easy, thought a bit deeper about my Cryptid Project idea and prepared for the Creative Hack.