Creative Date Week 3 - STORIES OF THE FUTURE NYC 2030

I went the hackathon for STORIES OF THE FUTURE NYC 2030 this weekend at Rlab. It is a two days event where filmmakers, storytellers and developers got together to generate visionary ideas and build prototypes with XR technologies to raise awareness and promote positive changes to accelerate climate action. On the Friday evening, we had a series of keynote speakers and meet the team members to create an inspiration board. On Saturday, we spent the whole day working in teams to ideate and create conceptual prototypes of the ideas with the guidance of XR experts.

Our team initially started with an idea of multiplayer experience of shaping the future of our habitability on the Earth. We want to use escape room concept to create a space where groups of policymakers, business leaders could participate and vote for different policy or business decision in order to go to the next level to see the impact and consequence of the decisions. However, we had spent a hard time debating around what kind of questions we should focused on in this scenario, and when experts are giving us advice, we felt that our idea is not very focused on specific industry. So we completely shift our idea into a different topic about sustainable fashion and how to use a pop-up show and AR scan to prompt people's awareness of fashion industry's impact on climate change. The flow is as below:

After we revisit our ideas and processes, we actually realize that we like our original idea more. But we have been influenced by different XR experts' suggestions and feedback along the way. I think many of them try to use their own experience to give specific example or other alternatives, so we finally feel lost in direction during the middle of the discussion for our first idea. The lesson learnt in this hackathon experience probably is that "be more confident with the ideas and do not buy in the advice all the time especially when it becomes too specific or personal."