Engagement through friendly competition

Company Bracket is a system that helps engage the employees of Zitcom in social and healthy activities. The system consists of a mobile dashboard application combined with NFC technology and the employees’ identity cards.

Company Bracket was designed over 36 hours at Denmarks’ largest hackathon for students AUHack2019. Our team at the hackathon consisted of five members: three with a background in digital design, and two with a background in IT-Product Development.

Our design isn’t a generic application made for any company. By digging into the specific pains and gains of Zitcom, we could unravel a design space that was a perfect match for the business.

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Key Values in our concept

As an IT-company, many of Zitcoms employees also engage with many different types of technology. The company have many programmers and engineers employed by them, and we learned that it isn’t unusual that the company coffee machine gets hacked from time to time. Engaging with the workplace through technology was one of the key value for our concept.

Zitcom as a business is undergoing many changes. They are buying up many of the smaller competitors on the market, and as a result, are welcoming many new employees who used to be competitors. During our early research phase, we learned that Zitcom have had great success with various competitions to increase employee health and engagement. A large part of the culture at Zitcom is therefore healthy competition. This company culture was one of the other key values in our concept.

Finally, as the general work culture at Zitcom mainly consist of sitting down and coding, in their respective department, the company encourages their employees to take social and healthy breaks during their work. Attached to the office is their own private gym, and they have several possibilities for entertainment, for example table tennis, table-soccer and more. These are all places where the employees can meet each other, and socialize, beyond their department. The final key value for our concept therefore was solidarity.

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A full design process in just 36 hours

During the first day of the hackathon, we mainly focused on ideation, brainstorming and domain research. We ended the day with a concrete idea and a direction for the hackathon.

During the second day, the team divided into two categories: Developers and User Experience designers. The developers worked with the hardware and mobile application, while the User Experience designers worked with the user interface design, the user experience of the product and the final presentation for the hackathon.

At the second half of day two, one of the User Experience designers began to prepare for the final pitch and focused on the communication and storytelling of our design idea.

During day two, we laser cut a floorplan of the Zitcom office and additional 3d models to help convey the idea of our concept as a system engulfing the whole workplace, and not just being situated at one specific location.

The final system consisted of a mobile application which communicated with our central server hosted on Googles Firebase system. The server was connected to an NFC-reader through an Arduino WiFi board.

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Mediator for the team

My most important role for the Zitcom – Company Bracket project was as mediator between the different team members. Already before the hackathon began, I facilitated the creation of the team by contacting the different people that I imagined could work great together.


During the hackathon I worked with all aspects of the final product, from User Experience research to hardware assistance and 3d-printing.

My role was to keep an overview of all the actors in the design and development process. I mediated the communication between the developers and the user experience designers. If an issue arose or a request emerged from one of them, I communicated this to the other part. This meant that we reduced unnecessary friction and arguments, which lead to a better flow for our process.

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The team

Us with the employees representing Zitcom. Our team from left to right: Michael Halstrøm, Marcus Due Jensen, Anders Wiggers, Thor Garske Andresen & Maria Berthel

Awards won:

• 1st place for the Zitcom case: "Making work life better and easier through automation" at AUHack 2019
  
  
• The "MLH Best Use Of Google Cloud Platform" award, at AUHack 2019
  

Key Roles in the project:

• Initiated the formation of the group and contacted the individual members
  
  
• Mediator between the members of the team during the hackathon
  
  
• Assisted in domain research.
  
  
• Assisted in Interviewing
  
  
• Assisted in User Interface design
  
  
• Assisted in Hardware
  (Arduino-programming, Lasercut & 3d-Printing)
  

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