Designing for Hack the Commute

Designing for Hack the Commute

Local civic tech hackathons and uncoferences are a great way to get to know a community even as it is gelling into one.  I went to Hack the Commute, hosted by the City of Seattle and the Washington State Department of Transportation, and was very happy to see a number of familiar faces there.  It was a great event, and very well run — a good role model for future hackathons.

As someone who can wear multiple hats I am never quite what role I will fall into at these events — research scientist, data analyst, developer, designer, artist — however by some intuition I brought my Mac to this hackathon (loaded up with Illustrator and Photoshop) and joined the Dokoji team as the designer for a day.  They are developing an app that “turns your conversation in to smart decisions”.     It was a very interesting problem — how might we integrate different sources of open data relevant to the moment-to-moment context of a text conversation, as people seek to converge in place and time?

Here are some of my design mockups:

Design mockups exploring integrating contextually relevant open data and social media into text messaging conversation.

Design mockups exploring integrating contextually relevant open data and social media into text messaging conversation.

The full slide deck for our short wrap-up presentation is posted on github here.  To quote their summary:

“For Hack the Commute, we integrated data sets that would allow people to explore green transportation options, so once a group of people had picked a destination, they would be presented with 3 options: Find the closest bus using the OneBusAway data set; find the closest bike rental location using the Pronto data set; and a carpool option (future implementation). On the back end, we also integrated impact data from Washington State Department of Transportation. “

Thanks to the Dokoji team, it was great fun hacking the commute with you.