UNA.TEN - REMOTE DESIGN HACKATHON

UNA.TEN-The final remote event.

Employer: Università di Bologna 

Client: European Universities Alliance UNA EUROPA                                     April 2020

The Team:                                                                                                            Matteo Vignoli - Academic responsible                                                                  Alice Colombo, Alberto Miti, Eleonora Musca - design thinking coaches

Silvia Marchini - Program coordinator & design thinking coaches                      I was the network program coordinator; my primary responsibilities were creating the design process and the organization of the network online meetings (European teaching team update, kick-off, milestone e final presentation).
Most of my work is described in the UNA.TEN Vademecum, the hackathon comprehensive open-source handbook.

Goal of the project:

Una.TEN “Transform Emergency Now! 10 days for change” is an open innovation design process aimed at developing solutions to address real challenges in COVID19 post-emergency times.

UNA.TEN is promoted by UNA Europa, involving students and professors from the partner universities.

"The most surprising and exciting result of this hackathon was creating a network in such a brief period" 

Una.ten partecipant

The output:

Support to local organizations: each student's team from UNA.TEN delivered one project for a total amount of 19. The University of Bologna completed 4 projects, which were all implemented.                                                                                                                                                                                  Remote cooperation & Network building: as witnessed by students and professors, the most surprising and exciting result of this hackathon was creating a network in such a brief period. At a team level, the team members didn't know each other. Nevertheless, they were capable of cooperating and working under pressure, still having fun.
Besides, throughout the project, we had several "network online meetings," which ignited new connections. For example, the University of Edinburgh's project for its local partner has been adopted by the municipality of Helsinki.                                                                                                                                      
A hackathon process, which included new tools and approaches, was transferred to our university partners. My team has validated our fast open innovation process, which can also work at an international level. We have created an open-source Vademecum, which is accessible to anyone wishing to repeat the UNA.TEN experience to support organizations sailing difficult times.                    

The Una.Ten Vademecum preview. Click here to download.

The process:

Una.Ten involved more than 100 students from 7 universities, taking part in 19 projects.                                                                                                                    The hackathon revolved around 4 topics, each university could decide whether to work on all of them or less.

# 1 Rethink Culture & Entertainment

# 2 Digital security

# 3 Travelling and Tourism

# 4 Food supply chain

The main coordination challenges were about:              

• coordinating all the actors involved, even though we didn’t have any former professional relationship with them.
• Introducing the professors and Ph.D. to the design thinking approach and our hackathon process in no-time to enable them to coach their student-teams.
• Onboarding the partners from the other universities to tools, like Slack and miro, to enhance remote collaboration.
• Designing the interaction and communication flow to keep the whole teaching team aligned throughout the hackathon.
• Students engagement & network building through specific activities such as network warm ups and cross-contamination events where the different student teams were sharing their research and benchmark to inspire each other.