Experience Haus x City Of London Alumni Hackathon

On Saturday 7th May, 40 of our Experience Haus alumni descended on our studio in London to take part in another of our popular full day design hackathon. These events are open to everyone across our Experience Haus community, so we had students coming in who had taken part in various different courses, from product design to service design. Our alumni started arriving from 9:30am and at 10:00am we revealed the most anticipated part of the day: the brief and client for the day. 

Who was the client?

For this hackathon, we were lucky enough to be given a brief from the City of London Education Strategy Unit (ESU). The ESU is a strategic team within the City Corporation that exists to extend and enrich education experiences in the City and beyond to help all learners realise their full potential. Their focus is on ‘additionality’ – the parts of the education experience that sit outside of their core, statutory requirements of a school.

The design challenge

All over the world, there’s a growing belief that traditional models for schools and curriculums are broken. Employees have made it clear that increasingly, entry level employees aren’t equipped with the most sought after skills. At the same time, young people increasingly feel like what they learn, and how they learn it, is completely detached from the people they are and the world they live in. 

For the first time in decades, the global education landscape is in a state of radical change. Efforts to explore the future of schooling are underway all over the world – but often without the involvement of the most important stakeholders – the learners. 

The ESU wants to ensure they deeply understand the learner perspective on this topic, and they believe technology can really help this. Therefore, the challenge the ESU proposed to our community was to come up with a digital solution that helps secondary-age learners show the world how they would re-invent school or the education system, if they were given the chance to do so. What would they want to learn about and why?

Tackling the challenge

With a wide, and incredibly exciting challenge to get to grips with, we split our students into seven groups of 5 and from 11am – 6pm, they worked through the entire end-to-end design process, from research to ideation to prototyping, and finally pulled together a presentation at the end of the day that met the design challenge. It was amazing to see how much work they all managed to achieve in seven hours and has given the ESU lots of food for thought! 

Reflecting on the day, Torri from the ESU commented that ‘the whole exercise will help [the ESU] to be super focussed and effective with our next steps on this project.

A huge thank you to Experience Haus. It has been a real privilege to be involved in the project and for so much work to have gone into this, on behalf of trying to crack one of our challenges.”

Amit Patel, Creative Director & Founder of Experience Haus said: “This was the fifth time we’ve run this event and we look forward to running them even more frequently in the future. We have a fantastic studio for our students to enjoy, so we look forward to hosting them again in the future.”