Bangalore Design Meetup 2019: An expedition into the Fourth Dimension
A themed collaborative event for design enthusiasts
“A moon-sized asteroid is going to hit the earth in the next three months. The only way to escape is to build a spaceship and reach other planets. Just so that you know, the spaceship should be made with the limited junk material provided, and the constraints coded on the SPACED APP.”
This was the first message that flashed on the screens at the Bangalore Design Meetup (BDM) — Fourth Dimension. Seeing the message, the 240+ design enthusiasts attending the event were partly thrilled and partly excited about the adventure that was to follow. Soon, they realized it was not a usual Saturday for them, as they were in the dystopian world of the year 2050.
However, there was a possible escape route out of this doomsday situation — Build a spaceship, fly off to other planets, and save humanity. And that marked the beginning of ‘Junkyard Wars,’ an experiential journey at the BDM.
The Purpose of the Meetup
Since 2016, every year, Zeta’s design team has been organizing an ingenious event for design enthusiasts. The spirit of the event is to bring the entire design community together so that we can learn from each other and create something entirely new together.
Rather than being a run-of-the-mill event full of talks, panel discussions, and presentations, BDM intertwines elements of fun and creative activities to unlock out-of-the-box ideas. On offer is an array of ups-a-daisy sides that includes collaborative activities, hands-on learning workshops, experiential treats, and networking opportunities.
And yeah!! You do go back making some great friends as well.
Calling it the ‘Fourth dimension’
This year marked the fourth edition of BDM. Given the successful show last year, we were not sure how to outperform ourselves this year. However, the determined creatives worked up their grey matters and after brainstorming several creative theme ideas, settled on exploring the future of design — a world laced with many technological innovations where design is not only pre-eminent but also changing rapidly
The theme opened avenues for the experiential treat in 3D, Augmented Reality (AR), and Virtual Reality (VR). The artful experience was offered by the galactic and colossal decor of the event venue, and interactive AI learning in workshops, and a super cool ‘Spaced App’!
The Spaced App
So, you must be wondering about the spaced app. Does it make time travel possible? Well yeah, in a way it does, our fabulous team at Zeta challenged themselves and created this wonderful app exclusively for this meetup.
Before your excitement shoots through the roof, let’s talk about what exactly this app does. The app is based on augmented reality(AR) and hosted key challenges during the event. Secondly, with this app, the participants were provided a sneak peek into the ambiance of the other habitable worlds. Lastly, the Spaced app helped in the gamification of the event — maintain the scorecard of challenges and team allocation of the participants.
Other than contributing to the meetup, the Space App also helped our team to learn and gain exposure in AR technology. Moreover, it provided an opportunity for our developers to challenge themselves intellectually while building this AR-based App.
Thus, the ‘Spaced App’ was a crucial element of the event.
Timeline of the event
Let’s fast forward to the year 2050.
Doomsday had arrived, and an asteroid was about to hit the Earth. Sent into a tizzy, the participants were getting ready for the mission to build a spaceship and fly off to another planet to save humanity. However, it was not going to be so easy. There were challenges that had to be completed. And all the game rules had to be followed. Stringently!
Following were the game rules and instructions:
According to the rules, the participants were divided into different space troops. Excited, the teams installed the Spaced app and kick-started their troop’s campaign to complete challenges, earn space cookies, and build a sustainable & creative spaceship.
Three Challenges: Space portal + Space decode + Space Scavengers
In the year 2050, the earth would be a part of the large and cosmic ‘Galactic Federation,’ an intergalactic community. Time-to-time, this intergalactic community wised up the space troops in accomplishing tasks during challenges, assisting them in their mission to escape Earth. Overall, there were three different challenges to be solved.
Challenge#1: Space portal
In the first challenge named Space portal, the intergalactic community provided the space troops with a sneak peek into the alien planet, a new world where they were going to land after escaping the earth. Through a virtual door, camp members could catch sight of the clues about the constraints of their alien world.
Deciphering these clues would contribute towards earning space cookies. Understanding the constraints of the alien planet would help the space troop in designing and building the spaceship accordingly.
Challenge # 2: Space decode
Awaiting to host the space troops, the alien planets had sent a message via the Galactic Federation’s secret channel. But this was not a direct message. The message could only be decoded by the power of drawing in Augmented Reality. That marked the take-off to the second challenge named Space decode.
In this challenge, only one camp member from each space troop was conveyed the message, and he/she had to relay the same to his/her space troop, but using the power of drawing in Augmented Reality (AR). Once the space troops decoded the message, the federation was informed, and then the alien planets indicated their willingness to host the space troops. Subsequently, the space troops received space cookies and proceeded towards the next challenge.
Challenge #3: Space Scavengers
Suddenly, alarms started buzzing, and red alerts popped up. A message flashed on the screen:
“Flying off to another planet is a grueling and unpredictable journey. No one knows anything about the alien planets. Will there be food? Will there be water? There are so many questions with no definite answers. Hence, locate your items of the survival kit for sustaining this journey of your life.”
This message kicked off the third challenge named Space Scavenger, a virtual treasure hunt with survival kit items as treasure. As the items were distributed all across the event venue, they weren’t easy to find. To hunt for the treasure, members had to solve various clues and guess what physical objects had to be scanned to find the items.
After an intense round of accomplishing tasks, the space troops proceeded to further build and enhance their spaceships from junk materials collected from store using space cookies.
As this action-packed experiential treat was unfolding on one side of the venue, taking place on another side were two workshops where participants were on a quest to acquire knowledge about the futuristic design.
Learnings in the workshop
“Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.”
Well, that was the intent behind the workshops so that the participants could get the knack of building AR-based apps and generate art through coding on their own.
The first workshop was ‘How to build a basic AR App with Unity,’ and the other one was ‘Creating Art with Processing.JS.’
Manik Chugh, a Product Designer at Zeta, conducted the first workshop, which introduced participants to the topics related to AR technology as well as some relevant tools such as Unity and Vuforia. The session included demos on how to build a basic AR app, and subsequently, the participants took part in a hands-on session to develop their own basic AR App using Unity.
Lakshmanan Palani, an interaction designer at Zeta, led the second workshop on ‘Generative Art with Processing.js. Introducing a new coding language to designers, the session emphasized how Processing.js could be used to reduce the time taken by designers to create patterns, interactive animations, and graphics, alleviating the fear of coding from the design community.
Both of these workshops were held twice, with 45 attendees in each workshop. There was learning and fun.
We all are winners!
At the end of the event, it was time to choose the winners of the junkyard wars. The result was decided on the following basis:
1. The spaceship should be built according to the constraints of the alien world.
2. The spaceship should reflect the power of creativity and imagination.
All the troops had showcased their respective spaceships on Instagram IGTV, explaining why what, and how they went about solving their challenges.
And following a rigorous evaluation, team AIRAZOR was picked as the winner.
Lauding the moments of victory, the winning team received impressive prizes. Moreover, each attendee was appreciated with a uber-cool goodie bag.
Energized after completion of another successful edition of the Bangalore design meetup, we, at Zeta, wanted to share this story with everyone who is inspired by creativity, technology, and design. Seeing this fabulous bunch of folks, we are confident that the design community will continue to grow. We hope to see everyone again next year at another monumental creative collaboration.
We sincerely thank everyone who participated and hope they had terrific time-solving fun challenges, and interacting with others.
Last but not least, a huge thanks to our partner, Rakuten and organising team, facilities team, and IT team at Zeta. Without their massive support and contributions, the event wouldn’t have been such a great success.
So that was all about what happened in this year’s event. But wait, it is not over yet. We have one more blog post which will delve into the makings of Spaced app, the challenges faced by the team, and how they conquered it. So, stay tuned…
