BLOG POST

by Poomjai Nacaskul, Ph.D.
Chulalongkorn School of Integrated Innovation (CSII),
Poomjai.N@chula.ac.th
 — 2023.11.20  —

This piece will be super short guys. First of all, don’t get me wrong. I love prototyping. In fact, you can almost say that I built my career in (banking, financial risk management, quantitative analytics, and data science) around the fundamental belief that prototyping is amongst the most powerful tools when you need to showcase multi-disciplinary, innovative, and occasionally esoteric ideas to academics and professionals deeply entrenched in their “traditional” ways of doing things. To this day, my standard data-science/consultancy-project modus operandi is to use Wolfram Mathematica to prototype my solution/algorithm/visualisation, leaving the actual deployment-grade coding to whatever suits the application platform, mostly involving Python scripts at some point.

As for hackathon, while its ubiquity arrived late in my career, I have come to see it as an integral element of modern education, fostering creativity, teamwork, and self-expression, and so on. So this blog is meant, not as a detraction, but as a challenge, particularly on the “creativity” part of the premise.

But first, let’s make sure we are talking about the same thing. On the one hand, “prototyping” is the act of producing a prototype. On the other hand, it also refers to the framework and modality by which product development process under contemporary AGILE manifesto (as opposed to traditional “Waterfall” model) is undertaken. I am talking specifically about “prototype” in the former sense, especially how it figures in a typical hackathon event, where a prototype is taken to mean “mock-up mobile app user interface showcasing intended functionalities”.

 Likewise, I am not talking about good-old hackathons where data scientists are given hours or days “hacking away” at a dataset to come up with useful predictive analytics, but the more modern usage of hackathons where contestants “pitch away” their business startup ideas, beginning with some “pain points” meant to sound so deeply personal but at the same time universal to human existence (and yet something so deeply personal and universal have yet gone on unnoticed, unanswered, that is, till now). If it were up to me, I would rather call this kind of events a pitchathon, as you are surely not hacking away at anything¾except perhaps the judging panel’s wall of ambivalence!?

So technically when I ask “does prototyping (as part of a hackathon pitch) kill creativity?”, what I mean is “does the implicit or explicit instruction for pitchathon contestants to base their pitch narrative around mock-up mobile app user interface showcasing intended functionalities ends up undermining the very goal of organizing such events, esp. in term of fostering creativity (creativity in problem identification and formulation as well as creativity in solution idea and framework) amongst event participants?”

As dedicated contributor to the multi-disciplinary educational programme aimed squarely at fostering integrated innovations, I am not looking to venture-capitalise any of the pitched product. Rather, I am looking for demonstrative evidence of, inter alias, lateral thinking, technology awareness, intellectual curiosity, informed inspiration, user empathy, bold ambition, multi-disciplinary integration, scientific grounding, artistic flair, civic sense, sustainability mindset, and global citizenry. To me, seeing young people fuse these qualities into creative solutions to creatively formulated problems is a very precious, but rare, occasion to witness first-hand.

Pitch prototype, on the other hand, mostly tells me they can use Figma. Yes, there will be a landing page, a sign-in page, a freemium page, and finally the app functionalities, something around clothes, food, travels, aging society, recycling, hooking up with people and trends, all that obligatorily powered by AI.

Just once, I would like to see pitchathon contestants come out blurting “Sorry judges. Our team got seduced into this rabbit hole of societal-commercial problems, challenges, and opportunities. As a matter of fact we fail to come up with a definite solution (much less a prototype to speak of!) But from what I can only claim to be but our initial pass, our shallow dive, the team is willing to bet (a couple of years of our lives?) that solutions will involve a creative synthesis of …, with the ultimate upshot in terms of …, but to get there would probably require overcoming hurdles in the form of …” I would give them my contact info. No, I would ask for their contact info.

I don’t know how a “prototype-free” pitchathon will work, or that it will unlock the creative side of our young generation that I have not seen in years. At this point, I fail to come up with a definite solution (much less a prototype to speak of!).