Designathon, currently in its second edition, is a flagship event of Lollypop coined to bridge the gap between the academia and industry in the digital design domain. It is a platform for young, budding designers to experience a real-life design problem and to learn the process of crafting a usable, viable, and empathetic design solution. The event commemorates ‘World Design Day’ and celebrates the ‘Power of Design’.
Designathon, inspired by Hackathons, is an intensive 21-hour event, that aims to provide every participant with a profound learning experience and thereby build a smarter design ecosystem.
This year we invited 32 Design Students to participate in the design challenge. The participants were split into eight groups with four students and two in-house designers in each team. Our Design leads along with Anil Reddy, were present all throughout the night to guide and mentor each team.
All the participants were required to submit their portfolio and also express the intent to participate in the event. Priority was given to the profiles of the Graduating batch, who could be benefitted immediately in their career.
Total Applications Received: 250+
Total Application Accepted: 32
In-house Design Mentors: 21
Design Challenge Theme: Reimagining Sportstech
Tools Used: Adobe XD, Illustrator, Photoshop
Sponsors: RunAdam
Students were asked to reimagine the sports domain for one of our esteemed clients, RunAdam.
RunAdam is a 360-degree sports technology platform that envisions to help and empower aspiring sportspersons all over the world. It also aims to bring together the entire sports ecosystem on one platform by integrating data, creating access, and facilitating communication.
Under the RunAdam platform, one of the modules is ‘Sponsorship’. This module helps an athlete to raise funds in order to succeed in their career. Designers were asked to craft a solution to ensure that the platform was intuitive, easy to use, and lucrative for both athletes and sponsors.
It was a night filled with discussions, agreements & disagreements, ideation, stress, and a lot of laughter, smiles, and networking. Below, we have highlighted a few of the outstanding suggestions by different teams for the given problem at hand-
1. Using the word ‘sponsorship’ was debated on and new options were suggested to establish an emotional connect between an athlete and sponsors.
2. To enable designers from every part of India, ‘Conversational UI’ that works on tap more than type was designed.
3. To encourage sports people from rural areas, video message upload was suggested.
4. Clutter was reduced by asking information only when it was required. For example, KYC information was asked only when an Athlete was to receive sponsorship.
5. Gamification of the platform came into the limelight; one of the suggestions was introducing Avatar options for Athletes. In order to encourage the athletes to complete their profile, additional accessories were to be provided.
6. To motivate Athletes to complete their profile, teams suggested various solutions; one among them was sharing facts and figures of how other athletes have raised sponsorship by completing the information on the platform.
7. Media kit badges for promotion, appreciation were beautifully crafted.
8. New recommendations were also given to the RunAdam team; for example, a team designed a flow where, based on the sponsor’s interest, the suggestion of athletes seeking sponsorship could be populated.
Besides the obvious learning marathon, many of the designers expressed that they also found the event beneficial in terms of-
1. Being a Team Player: They learnt how to work in a team and understand others’ point of view, how everyone has different ideas and allowing others to speak could open up a stream of thoughts.
2. Learning Design Sprints: Our in-house designers introduced the students to the concept of design sprints to come up with various solutions in the given time period. They all expressed that they enjoyed crazy eights and sprint exercises.
3. Managing Stress: With limited time and a difficult task at hand, it could become extremely difficult to have patience. Balancing the different viewpoints and working collaboratively towards a solution was an eye-opener for many.
4. Importance of Soft Skills: They all understood the importance of inculcating soft skills within themselves. How communicating and presenting their ideas is equally important was learnt.
