Vattenfall Hackathon
“What has been missing from the Swedish energy debate is imagination. The power of innovation has been completely underestimated.”
During two full days in July 2017, Another Tomorrow teamed up with Swedish energy giant Vattenfall at their center for innovation in Älvkarleby where we lead the hackathon “The Future of Energy”.
The project was set in motion by communications agency DDB Stockholm and PR agency POST STHLM. The aim was to involve the public in Vattenfall’s commitment to lead the way in sustainable energy and a fossil fuel free Sweden. Another Tomorrow’s role was to design and facilitate the hackathon, as well as recruit different perspectives to participate.
The Process
Building upon our own process SLING, we structured a two-day hackathon that lead participants through stages of ideation, prototyping and testing. SLING is a design process that allows for future opportunities to be explored fast. Focus is placed on rapid prototyping and testing of ideas on a target audience in order to reach the critical stage of learning from new insights.
“In order to get truly disruptive ideas, it is important to consider different perspectives”
Swedish artist Lilla Namo giving participants a boost of inspiration
After inspirational talks from Swedish artist Lilla Namo, Another Tomorrow kicked off the hackathon with ideation.
In less than 1,5 hours and through a minute-by-minute facilitated process at rapid speed, 150 unique ideas had been generated and voted down to three. These three ideas were developed further during the afternoon and brought into the next phase where they were turned into visualised solutions — Prototyping.
Teams clustering ideas on post-it notes during Ideation.
Prototyping
Prototyping is the process of turning ideas into experiences that can be tested and reacted on. We started the second day of the hackathon with teams being asked to visualise their ideas in short, self-explanatory videos. These video prototypes were designed to be tested on the public as well as on representatives from Vattenfall.
One of the Vattenfall Prototypes called Svärmkraft
The video prototype above was called Svärmkraft: a platform that decentralises electricity production by gathering electricity generated by individuals through movement.
The power of perspective
For disruptive ideas to be created, we believe perspective is key. In order to get multiple perspectives on the prototypes at Vattenfall Hackathon, we connected to the public through Facebook.
A selected audience was invited to follow the hackathon through a closed Facebook group. Invites were sent out to the approx. 300 people who applied to join the hackathon as participants. Through this Facebook group the public could interact with the teams by posting questions and follow along in the hackathon through live streams.
This online audience was also asked to actively participate in the testing phase. In addition to the diverse group of people present at the hackathon, they served as an extra test-group that the teams could ask for input and feedback.
“The best part was to experience a new way of working, which is unlike anything I have tried before. It was exciting how fast everything went.” - Malin Strand, Sustainability expert and participant
The hackathon inspired Vattenfall to keep working on one of the prototypes presented and continue the iteration of it.
The participants from the Vattenfall Hackathon
