InfoPuppers
OVERVIEW——
During April 2018, I participated in my first hackathon, HackXX, a women-centric hackathon held at UCSD. I was on team of two, and my teammate and I came up with InfoPuppers which eventually went to win 1st place for Best Communications Project presented by Northrup Grumman.
At HackXX, I spent 48 continuous hours developing InfoPuppers. For my first hackathon, I wanted to create something fun and personal to me. I immediately though about my three dogs living with my parents. All three were adopted because my mother played a very large role in that. From time to time, my mother helps to foster dogs at our home until the dog is able to find their forever home. However, the initial onboarding process from foster care to adoption can be tricky. During foster care, my mother has to ensure the dog is both clean and healthy before they are passed on to their forever home. Dogs, unlike humans, don't have easily accessible medical records that someone, such as vet or an owner, can easily refer to. Often times, my mom just recieves some papers from the shelter for the dog she fosters because there's no website or centralized database that holds this information, and transient dogs such as the ones in foster care don't really leave a paper trail As the front-end developer of InfoPuppers, I designed the user interface of InfoPuppers. Through some low-fidelity sketches, I quickly came up with a user interface using Jade. Users can type a dog's unique microchip ID number which will then generate a profile provided by a blockchain database. The profile includes a picture of the dog on the immediate left, and then the center is populated with a brief medical history. The users are also allowed to upload and edit scanned files of physical medical records. My teammate and I strongly believed that a blockchain database would be advantageous for our project because it centralizes information and ensures security. Furthermore, it guarantees easy accessibility which is great for veternarians and animal rescue specialists.
HACKXX 2018
My teammate Matthew and I winning Best Communication Project at HackXX 2018, presented by Northrup Grumman
You can find the DevPost and the demo for this project down below.
LESSONS LEARNED
A hackathon only provides so much time and not a lot of opportunity to test or iterate. There were a lot of other elements and avenues I had to consider but I didn't have the time. Actually, it's a very unlike design because hackathons encourage fast innovation while design heavily emphasizes a nonlinear process that includes many iterations. However, as a demo project, I'm extremely proud of what I was able to come up with. I went in as a first-time hacker, not knowing how to code in Jade, and struggling to utilize design practice in an enviroment that was difficult to do so. I overcame a lot of these obstacles, and regardless if my project had obtained a prize or not, I am glad that I am able to utilize my skills to create something I'm passionate about, improving dog welfare. This experience was a really important step forward in being more bold and confident in my ideas as a designer.
Thank you Matthew for pushing me to participate in HackXX. Thank you to HackXX and Northrup Grumman for pushing out a women-centric hackathon and highlighting our project as the Best Communications Project. And thank you to whoever invented salsa and chips, made those long hours a lot more bearable.