Facilitating a virtual Design System Hackathon for 200 participants from all around the world
A non-profit Design Systems Hackathon by Into Design Systems — took place in January 9–10th 2022. It was an event organized by the community for the community. People from all over the world came together for 24 hours to design & build something to improve design systems daily work (tools, plug-ins, hacks …). It was a time to share ideas & network.
Setting the stage
The events kicked off with a tour around the interactive board that worked as our common place for interaction. People could also share their location, nationalities, feedback, check the agenda, make notes and post the ideas. With the participation of around 200 people, it was exciting to see so many cultures coming together to share their passion about Design Systems.
These were some of the flags we’ve seen:
🇮🇲 🇩🇪 🇳🇱 🇸🇰 🇦🇹 🇳🇮 🇧🇷 🇪🇬 🇸🇦 🇷🇴 🇸🇪🇨🇭 🇵🇹 🇬🇧 🇵🇭 🇪🇸 🇨🇿 🇭🇰 🇮🇳 🇸🇬
That’s 20+ countries! It has been a true blessing to be able to host these types of events, bringing people together, giving them the opportunity to learn from each other, not just professionally but also on a personal level. At Into Design Systems, we try to enable this human connection in our events when we ask people to share fun facts about themselves. Here are some fun examples:
“I swim in open waters”
“I have 30 plants”
“I already swan in a lake with piranhas”
“I lived in 11 countries”
“I’m scared of Vampires”
“I need about 3h sleep a day”
“Corona made me build a plant nursery, I have 78 plants now. Before I was a plant killer”
“I can do 2000 jump rope in 7 mins”
“I was a barista with Ellie Goulding, the singer!”
“I can make my stomach grumble on wish”
“Colombian, based in Thailand, planning to move to an island soon.”
“I like to research about cryptid animals”
“Love doing Yoga splits”
“Sweet tooth and live with 7 kitties”
“I’m a yogi”
“I cook dog food quite very well”
“I enjoy watching korean variety shows”
“I have 2 ferrets”
As we went through some of these fun facts, I couldn’t help but think “That’s so cool!” or “I didn’t even know that was possible!”. It’s quite incredible to be exposed to all of this at the comfort of my house.
🪄Inspiring the audience
To engage the participants in this hackathon we brought in 3 highly skilled professionals:
- Zero, Sr. Product Designer at SoundCloud- Creator of the Dark Vader Figma Plugin
- Jan Six, Sr. Product Designer at GitHub, Creator of the Figma Tokens Plugin
- Mike Kamminga, Creative Technologist
Our Design System Professionals gave us some amazing insights and got everyone motivated to get started on their ideas.
Zero told us about shipping several themes but only maintaining one with his Dark Vader Figma plugin. Jan Six shared his experience with coming up with solutions for his own problems and how that turned into several plugins for Figma. While Mike Kamminga left everyone curious with his suggestions on how to use AI to generate components in Figma.
🧙🏼It’s time to hack
For the structure of the Hackathon, the participants spent some time on the interactive board to share their ideas and see what others thought of it. In total there were 40+ ideas posted, each quite unique and ranging from all areas. It clearly reflected the struggles designers face in their design system workflow.
About 25% of the ideas were for new Figma plugins, 20% were related to documentation, 15% were suggesting improvements that could benefit stakeholders, a few ideas involved only coding, and some aimed at building assets, like an improved component library.
The teams were formed organically, our only suggestion was to keep the team count to a maximum of 10 people — after all, we know how hard it is to work in a big team. For communication, they could create their own channels in the IntoDesignSystem slack. It was really exciting to see that most were very interested in taking part and contributing to an idea that they identified with, and quickly enough we started seeing the movement happening.
The main challenge for a virtual hackathon is that people are in different time zones, but that didn’t stop these Design Systems enthusiasts. The teams actually used this to their benefit, setting up shifts and distributing the workload. It was the best way to make use of the time available, which was only 24 hours to work and present the final results.
The finish line
The community that is developing around the Design System world is one that certainly has a lot of energy. The people that came for this DS Hackathon took time from their Friday evening and Saturday to meet strangers, brainstorm, ideate, and maybe even prototype an idea that could be beneficial to others.
At 8pm CET we came together in the main event to see the final results. The 10 teams that were formed in the previous day had 5 minutes to present what they built and it was a true show! Each proposing a one-of-a-kind, jaw-dropping solution. They truly hacked incredible ideas and were even able to show us prototypes of what could make the lives of those working with design systems much better.
It was an intense 24 hours, but ultimately we learned that there’s plenty of struggles yet to be solved in the Design System world and there are a lot of talented people out there who are able to come together and propose solutions for all of it.
The winners & the prizes
After the pitch presentations (that you can watch here along with the premiation, if you’re curious), the best ideas were voted on, resulting in the Hackathon winners.
We were looking for four winners in total, since we had four prizes to award, kindly powered by Into Design System, Jan Six, Marc Andrew and Michal Malewicz. Therefore, we opened the round of voting not only to the Hackathon contestants but also to the whole community: everyone participating in the voting session had a chance to vote for the three presentations they liked best.
We used a Miro board to vote, and this was the situation after the voting:
It was pretty clear who won the hackathon: the Team Handoff Kit (here you can watch their pitch) won the first place of this Hackathon, followed by Team Component Automator, Team Responsive Textstyler and Team Storybook Extractor.
This Team came up with an idea for a plugin for Figma that works as a designer’s kit to organize and automatically add specifications that —we know— always makes developers happy.
What do we learn from this? People from all over the world love collaborating and learning from each other, coming together to have fun, learn, share & create. It was amazing and inspiring seeing how great was the team spirit, even between people that never met before and were living in different time zones. As Taylor Cashdan said, we found our true mantra and core value for this experience in this experience: together, we create.
Together, we create.
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If you want to read first-hand what it takes to succeed in hackathon, make sure to check out Taylor Cashdan, from the winning team, who published his thoughts on this experience.
Our Next event: 🛸 The Future of Design Systems
🛸 The Future of Design Systems — Online Conference
🗓 May, 23–25 2022
👩🏻🎨 12+ speakers
❤️ 500 #DesignSystem Friends
🎫 Limited Tickets (500)
Main topics:
- Multibrand & Multi Product Design Systems
- Design Tokens & Design Tokens Workflows
- Automation of Design & creation of component libraries
- Design Ops & more.
What to expect:
Expect a lot of demos, concepts, new strategies & content you will not find anywhere else, as it is from The Future 😉🛸
We believe the speakers & the content we have carefully curated, might be one of the pioneers in the Design System field — now we want to spread their work & knowledge. As usually you will be able to apply the learnings, concepts, hacks, workflows & tools to your daily work.
Speaker Preview:
& Many more.
Get one of the limited tickets — Join the Future of Design Systems
Thanks for your time & hope to see you at one of our events.
