case studies: Junction hackathon

Background

Junction is one of the biggest annual hackathon in the world. This year 2019 is the 3rd year of Junction Tokyo. This is the second time in my life to participate in a hackathon. This year, there re 3 themes that everyone has to choose from which are

APIs Hack
AI For Humanity
Mad Media

Our team consists of 4 members including me. 2 members are back-end developers, one is a service designer, and I'm a front-end developer. We firstly did not decide specifically which route we want to take, instead, we discussed about problem we encount1ered in our life and see whether we could use any technologies corresponding to the themes to solve the problem. Each of the member come up with around 4 to 5 problem.

Ideas we came up with during the brainstorming session

We discuss each one by one and finally agreed on working with number 12, which is a healthcare problem that patients with low literacy could not understand medicine label. The reason that we picked this problem is that

We believe there is needs for this problem
It matches the theme of this hackathon, either API for Ai

Objective

This hackathon is actually the first experience for most of our members so we did not aim for winning whatsoever. Just to have fun at the hackathon kind of. However, we did believe that the problem we’re trying to solve is a serious one and genuinely tried to solve the problem. In short, our ultimate goal was to help those patients who are in need.

Result

In hackathon, although we could not get the first prize, we were selected as finalists for the Ai for humanity path. Yay ! On the production side, we are still on the progress of making this service available to the public.

My Role

My role was a visual design fot the user interface. I tried to make the flow of the application as simple as possible so its easy for the back-end side to work smoothly.

Reflection

The good part is that we had a lot of fun during the hackathon. Also, I personally think I did pretty well with the design of the applicaton.

The bad part is that it took me so much time learning how to use NativeScript which is a technology I have never used before. Moreover, I am not good at working overnight so I just went back home by last train while most of my team members stayed overnight working at the hackathon venue.