Live design competitions have been one of the best ways for new (and existing) designers to showcase their chops and get great exposure without having to pull out their portfolios. Additionally, watching a mouse arrow dive through command menus and toolbars can be one of the best ways of re-imagining a software program or getting inside the creative mind of a fellow designer. Hatch Live is the latest live design competition from new collaborative design platform Hatch Hub that sits two competitors in front of a projected screen while they battle out designing a product in a fast-paced 5 round, 80 minute period. We stopped by the very first competition last week in NYC to check out this unique take on competitive speed-modeling and talked with the competitors about modeling under pressure in front of a live audience.

From Design Brief to Design Execution in 80 Minutes

The Hatch Live Design Competition is setup as a ‘knockout tournament’ with a series of head-to-head matches. After receiving the design brief, product category (table, seating, etc) and bounding constraints, both competitors dive straight in to Rhino (with T-Spines and Grasshopper installed) with the goal of finishing the design in under 80 minutes. In a unique twist in the traditional competitive process, Rounds 2, 3, and 4 consist of the competitors swapping seats in order to ‘improve upon’ the other’s design (round 1 kicks off the design, round 5 completes it). While this may seem counter-productive in a competitive environment, the goal is to ‘one-up’ the other competitor with updated features on the original design:

During rounds 2 and 4, designers can not delete each other’s work. You can make suggestions and create new elements but you can not delete elements. It is up to each designer to choose whether to include these new elements into their designs or not. We encourage you to include some elements from your opponent into your designs but that is at your discretion.

With a first-place prize of $4000, a ‘Designer in Residence’ feature from Shapeways at the Museum of Arts and Design, and a brunch and portfolio review with Surface Magazine’s former Editor-in-Chief Dan Rubenstein, having a winning design in Hatch Live goes far beyond just bragging rights with friends. We had a chance to talk with competitors Liz Khoo, Wil Rodriguez-Joglar, Nick Domanski, and Austin Robey and gain a little bit more insight into their competition experience.

Have you ever modeled with a live audience? What was it like?

LK: No, this was my first time. I just tried to focus on what I was doing and not get distracted.

WRJ: I have never done it before and its quite an interesting feeling, especially when your screen is being projected 4 times larger. There’s a certain process of trial and error when designing which people usually forget about, plus there are many different ways of reaching a result…with a live audience there’s an extra layer to add to your work, you expose the way you think and work. I think that it is a great way to learn, but also a great way to exercise your brain to work harder and faster…a quicker action/reaction.

ND: Designing and modeling live was a completely new experience for me, however I felt surprisingly comfortable. Most of my attention was focused on my design so it was easy to forget that I had an audience across the room.

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What’s your design background and how did you get involved with Hatch Live?

LK: I’ve said that I have an outsider approach to design in the sense that I wasn’t an industrial design major or anything like that. Right now I’m a graduate student at the Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) at NYU, which is about applied technology and the result being that you do projects that align with and borrow from many different design fields.

Before then, I had taken a few introductory product design courses in night class. “Design thinking”–its principles and methods–are things that have permeated the business world, so those are ideas that I’d learned about and used in my career in analytics and strategy for digital creative agencies.

More specifically, I learned Rhino at ITP this past Spring for a class about conveying data in ‘everyday objects’. My teammate and I created a 3d-printed sink basin that visualized MTA turnstile data after Hurricane Sandy; since then I’ve found Rhino to be a useful and fun tool for realizing other projects. Hatch Live was promoted on the ITP floor, and I applied out of curiosity.

WRJ: I am an architect, and on my everyday basis I work more on projects that are of a much larger scale than the ones being designed for Hatch Live but I also enjoy furniture design a lot and have experience designing custom furniture. Through this, and some ideas that I would like to eventually put in the market is how I came to meet the people at Hatch Hub and find out about Hatch Live.

ND: My background is in industrial design with a focus on furniture and lighting. Matthew (founder of Hatch Live) sent an e-mail to me detailing the event and I immediately knew it was something I wanted to be a part of.

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Did you have time to work on the design ahead of time or was it all improv?

LK: I was given about a week’s notice and did think about what shapes I wanted to start with, hoping that the improv part would come from the exchange rounds. But it was difficult to design on top of someone else’s work in 10 minutes, and so much of Rhino modeling is knowing the orientation of your components. The exchanges might have been more influential as 5-minutes of critique.

WRJ: To be honest it was not all improvised. I hand sketched my idea on the way to the contest, so that I could have an idea of what to create…more or less. I wasn’t sure of what to expect from this new contest concept and the way in which your opponent can alter your design, so I also wasn’t sure of how much of “making an effort before hand” would be worth.

ND: I had a concept in the back of my mind that I wanted to pursue further, however several adjustments were created on the spot.

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Any advice for the next round of competitors? If you did something different next time what would it be?

LK: I’d say just have fun with it and embrace the fact that it is an experiment. Head-to-head competition is definitely an unusual situation for designing. If I were to do it again… I don’t know if there’s anything I could change. I had a clear idea of what my design represents, the story it tells and who would own it. If I were to change that story then I could end up with a different design.

WRJ: My advice would be to really think on ways to improve your opponent’s design. It can be a little tough when two people with totally different styles meet but there’s is always a way. Even if it is a conceptual idea that your opponent takes and interprets in his style. I would definitely improve the way I work with my opponent’s design. Unfortunately on my first time altering my opponent’s design I started using his elements but changing it too much, rather than taking what he had and adding elements that I consider would improve the design. So did my opponent, but by the second time we both got a better grasp of it.

ND: I would advise the competitors to take a look at their opponent’s work when it is projected on to the large screen. As a result, they will have a sense of the project before it is time to switch screens. This is what I would have done differently during my match. Furthermore, it is important to thoroughly consider all input from your opponent before resuming work on your design.

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