We are so proud of our participants at the Ocean Future Lab Hackathon and what they have achieved last week during exciting 48 hours.
On Sept 21 we kicked off with a welcome round. Almost 130 people joined our Slack channel and were ready to bring in their skills and competencies to get solution ideas accelerated! Nicole Loeser, board director at the Institute for Art and Innovation Berlin, gave a short introduction in the Ocean Future Lab and our Hackathon and Science Slam program afterwards. During our first intro sessions we got to know many different ideas and perspectives all around saving oceans! We were delighted to see the teams being active the whole day and couldn’t be more grateful to learn from our first science slammer, Louise Fuglsang from Futurice, you have to love the problem to solve it!
On Thursday, Sept 22, we started our productive day at 9am. An hour later polar expedition photographer Manolo Ty came on stage with a great advice: If you want people to be emotionally involved in problems you have to work with pictures and stories to create an understanding and open their hearts and minds. After him we heard marine biologist Fabian Ritter speaking about Dolphins and Whales: Deep Ecology. A lesson learnt was that we need to work with and not against nature and that mammals are able to think and feel like us -therefore, mindful conservation has to come in place. After lunch, geo scientist and physicist Laura Barth gave valuable insights into the everyday life on Antarctic expeditions. Her progressive research helps retrieving data to better and safer access an icy continent instead of using weather forecasts. Afterwards, Soli Levi’s slam opened with a self-composed poem. Her expertise lies in coastal and marine governance, geographic information system technology, science awareness, and education. We were amazed about her PhD work on how to connect emotions to science.
On Sept 23, the teams proceeded working with their teams and mentors on their pitches. Their amazing ideas were then presented in the afternoon to an expert jury consisting of Dr. Marko Freese, Dr. Neele Meyer, Joerg Altekruse, Nicole Loeser, Michael Adler and Matthias Goerres. In the evening we all got together for the winner announcements.
Huge congratulations to our Ocean Future Ambassador Awardees:
For their wonderful and innovative pitches and ideas
Plapla! The floating whale as well as to
Upstream Algae Shopping Spree got the second place
The first place was given to the team of Float-Generator.
A heartfelt thank you to all participants and especially to our amazing mentors: Konstantina Mavridou, Dr. Christian Hamm, Carol Mancke, Marzie Sasani, Buket Dönmez, Dr. Ulrike Heine, Laura Scherer and Mona Lüders as well as to all our IFAI team.
The Ocean Future Lab is a project of the “Science Year 2022 – Participate!”. It is funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research. Partners are the German Alliance for Marine Research, the Institute for Art and Innovations, the German Oceanographic Museum Stralsund and the German Maritime Museum Bremerhaven in collaboration with the Futurium Berlin and the Film University Babelsberg.