Topcoder’s Live User Experience at Water Innovation Festival Makes a Big Splash
Who says an event centered around water
utilities can't be fun, innovative and produce excellent real-time solutions to
water problems? That's what happened July 8 to 12 at
the Northumbrian Water Group’s NWG Innovation Festival in Newcastle, United Kingdom.
Every year the NWG Innovation Festival hosts a
series of sprints, data hack challenges and quests aimed at harnessing innovative
genius related to water. This year, the festival planners upped the stakes by
partnering with Topcoder to run a Live User
Experience (LUX) design challenge during the five-day event, which included a
focus on how to use food and technology to connect local and rural communities.
Live User Experience Focused on Outdoor Plant and Garden Systems
Northumbrian Water Group partnered with Topcoder
to run a LUX design
challenge for an app that would communicate
with plant sensors to help growers and gardeners learn more about their water
usage. The app would then be used to link individual growers, through the plant
sensors, to create communities of growers that could interact and coordinate
with each other as they grow plants. An app that monitors water flow, and
coordinates water flow between different growers or within a community of
growers is useful, especially when it comes to water rights and concern about
water scarcity. The app enables a community of gardeners to link all of the
sensors from their gardens, and also helps other communities like school
groups, for example, to link together.
Competitors Worked Within
Clear Challenge Parameters
Competitors were given 44 hours, between July 10 and 12, to work on the challenge. Seventy-five Topcoder members registered for the challenge with 68 members competing. Guidelines included producing layered PSD files created in Adobe Photoshop or similar programs, offering clean visuals and intentional color, and designing presentation screens that featured concepts for plant sensor apps that allowed users to display and share information.
You can view the full LUX competition spec here.
The Results of the LUX - Plantasium Mobile App Design Concepts
Challenge
Every LUX design
challenge yields dozens of fresh perspectives and design ideas that lead to smarter,
more competitive results. Topcoder community members created innovative designs
that demonstrated the power of crowdsourcing as a way to create quality results
over a short period of time. Congratulations to every Topcoder community member
that contributed and pushed the envelope to design smart, community-driven
solutions. Congrats to our top 5 winners!
1st place winner: ToxicPixel - https://www.topcoder.com/members/ToxicPixel
2nd place winter: iamtong - https://www.topcoder.com/members/iamtong
3rd place winner: L.O.I - https://www.topcoder.com/members/L.O.I
4th place winner: yiming - https://www.topcoder.com/members/yiming
5th place winner: starck181995 - https://www.topcoder.com/members/starck181995
Check out the full LUX results:
LUX Partnership Was a Swimming
Success
A big thanks to Northumbrian
Water Group for the opportunity to partner with them at their 2019 NWG
Innovation Festival. The LUX challenge generated on-site excitement while
demonstrating the innovative power of crowdsourcing. The collaboration gathered
the brightest minds in the innovation and tech industry to lend their expert
thinking to solve problems related to water. We had a whale of a time!