Institute For The Future

Week 1: Interns get hacking

For 24 hours starting on June 23 at 2:00pm, we IFTF interns racked our brains for a small "Hack Day". IFTF affiliate Ariel Waldman had briefed us with general guidelines and some sample projects from past Hack Days. But the space of possibilities was wide open. Our goal was to progress from the mind-map phase to the throw-something-together phase on one or several good ideas related to California.

Our initial brainstorm was quite diverse. We knew that we liked boxes, the moon, beaches, and spacetime, but the specifics were lacking. Melissanthi started scanning through twitter posts about the moon, Nick and Joe discussed Nick's recent mishap with Caltrain, Zach opened photoshop, and I perused google images for zero-gravity toys. We were on our way!

Our final "hack" was a compilation of five sketches. Joe opened with his idea for an iPhone app that allows people who are running late for social gatherings to automatically project their ETAs as well as current locations to the group. He then continued with a museum-at-the-beach prototype, consisting of Nick's excellent photoshop wizardry. Zach presented his and Joe's idea for accessing an archive of past visions of the future overlaid on the present. Melissanthi showed the analysis of her twitter-mining, including categorizations of public expressions about the moon. I presented a mock-up of a zero-gravity spring-based toy I hastily assembled from ace hardware parts. Zach complimented with a wonderful sketch of a lunar toolkit, and Nick added a great photoshop advertisement.

It's surprising what people can do with only a day to build an no pre-planning. With some VC funding and a handful of support coders and designers, the sky's the limit. We interns are looking forward to our next test - our week-long prototyping is underway, and we'll be presenting to staff next Wednesday.