Design seniors Mason Young-Shor and Maddy Cha recently participated in Rehack, a reverse hackathon hosted at Princeton University. The theme of the hackathon was social interactions within one of these problem spaces—consumer media, social networks, productivity tools, or sharing economy.
The hackathon started off with a keynote speaker, Sri Jalasutram, who leads inclusive design & accessibility practice within Uber’s design team. Sri spoke about how to design for different types of users and how the design process has been changing within industry.
Maddy and Mason worked on creating a way to improve social interaction in Spotify, through Active Listening. Spotify Active Listening is a premium feature that allows users and artists to DJ/curate for an audience in real time through the act of listening parties. Users listening are able to suggest songs as well as upvote/downvote suggestions from other users to influence the music being played. After five hours, they were able to produce a working prototype of the feature with considerations for different types of users and user flows.
Young-shor and Cha’s experience at Rehack was provided in part by the Design Student Experience Fund. The Design Student Experience Fund aims to help subsidize expenses Design students can incur while pursuing opportunities outside the School of Design.