Concept Presentation — Solace

For our hackathon sprint, we started off researching the impact of the coronavirus upon several global industries that have had to incur huge losses and furloughed a large percentage of its blue label workers, throughout their supply chain. We also saw that a massive amount of local businesses across the globe were running out of business due to the lockdowns declared by each country. We read deeply into this subject and were posed with just one question…

“How can we, as a small group of students, help uplift this global community?’’

The answer lay in the question itself, since we are a small group, we help a smaller community! Our local businesses. Stationery shops, small grocery stores, tailoring shops etc., all of which are walking distance from our houses but are running out of business during this epidemic since they lack an online presence to offer their services. Once we settled on this idea, we brainstormed different methods of creating a social network between those who would require these services and those who could provide them.

We chose the idea of creating an app called ‘Solace’ which would provide our local businesses with an online presence and an online market of consumers closest to their location. We named it ‘Solace’ since it described perfectly our aim with this platform, to provide comfort to both consumers and local retailers in this time of great distress.

We spent almost 2 days of the hackathon process in ideation and visualization of the app. We were left with just one day to create our 2-minute video pitch. We had created only a few screens of the app to visualize the layout and better explain the app in the video but creating our video pushed most of us to our limits with all of us at each other’s throats to compile our work and submit the video.

On an MS Teams call for almost 6 hours with tons of yelling, laughing, ‘After Effects’ rendering and breaking down we were able to submit our video a little before 12:00 AM that night.

Completely exhausted the next day, neither of us worked on any of our other assignments and felt totally solaced by it. :)

By Arnav Bavishi & Mohammed Al-Saleh