Creative Hack: UAL cross-college collaboration to tackle social and environmental challenges

UAL’s Creative Hack took place in person at High Holborn over 3 days and this year's theme is ‘Collaborate and Create for Positive Change’.

This year Careers and Employability has once again led this creative hackathon which was organised by teams and staff at each of the UAL colleges that support student and graduate enterprise. The event gave participants the opportunity to come together to learn, innovate, create and present their ideas. The aim was to address the challenges London face and make it a better place to live, work and visit.

Just under 200 students and recent graduates applied to take part. Over 70 students attended forming 13 mixed college teams. They worked on the following themes: Responsible Technology; Environment and Sustainability; or Social Justice and Equality. The teams worked together over the 3 days before pitching their ideas to a panel of industry and entrepreneurial expert judges. This year's judges included; Karishma Gupta, Genevieve Pace, Noah Bier and Matt Kennedy.

Three teams won prizes from the £3,000 prize pool. Our overall winning team, DisCover, won £1,500 and their theme was Social Justice and Equality. The team proposed a brilliant idea for an app that is made for people with disabilities to easily locate different types of accessible places around them. App users can also add their own comments to these accessible places to contribute to the community and help other app users.

Participants were supported throughout the three days with talks, coaches and mentors and a host of resources in their hacking space.

“I believe the Creative Hack gave us all a wonderful opportunity to both meet new people and make full use of our skillsets to work together on inspiring ideas. We only had three days to research and create our business model with people we had just met. This made it challenging but also very exciting. Our project is now coming together and we’re thrilled at the idea of taking this further and hopefully it can become something that might hold value in the future!” – Creative Hack participant

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