Team iGas Emerges Winner At Lagos Labs 2016!
- Mahassin L. Quadri
- May 9, 2016
- 3 min read
It was a long May Day weekend at Cre8Space (@cre8spaceng) on Agorro Odiyan in Victoria Island. Dozens of engineers and hackers spent the weekend toiling over their innovative ideas, opting to miss out on sleep, food and on occasion a quick shower. Thats because they all took part in Lagos Labs 2016. For some, it was their first time participating in a hackathon, while others were regular hackers. Their challenge was to come up with a prototype for a hardware related solution to a challenge prevalent in the Nigerian environment in just 24 hours!
Lagos Labs 2016 is a hardware hackathon organised by The Design Institute Lagos (@tdilagos). Lagos Labs, tagged #LagosLabs2016 has been touted as one of the most important tech events of the year because of the novel approach of focusing on hardware and the Internet of Things (IoT), an aspect of technology which is still developing in the Nigerian tech space. Lagos Labs targets societal, infrastructural and environmental challenges, and provides guidance so projects can be adequately prototyped and possibly implemented.
Many have argued in recent times, that hardware has no future because it will be replaced by software. This premise has been used to justify or defend the unbalanced focus on software and ecommerce in Nigeria, Africas largest technology hub. According to Lotte Elsa Goos (@Kaleduscope) and Toks Fagbamigbe (@olafag), co-founders at The Design Institute Lagos, Lagos Labs 2016 has successfully disproved this premise. Indeed the future of hardware is right here!
The Design Institute Lagos promotes a process called Design Thinking, a mindset and a way of seeing, thinking about and doing things by tapping into emotion and observation as a tool for training people to think like designers and thereby open people within corporations up to unleash their potential, make innovation happen and catalyze innovation. (Learn more about the design institute here www.lagos.design).
Lagos Labs 2016 was open to anyone interested in hardware and innovation, including engineering teams and individuals from diverse backgrounds. Interested hardware hackers registered online to be able to participate in the event.
Here's what went down.
The event kicked off with a 3 day workshop from Tuesday 27th April, to get participants acquainted with hardware development using Arduino kits (@arduino) and 3D printing technology (@3dprintindustry), followed by the hackathon which started on Friday, April 29, and ended on Sunday, May 1, 2016 when the teams got the opportunity to present their prototypes to the panel of judges. At the end of Day 1 of the hackathon, some 30 ideas where presented, focusing majorly around issues like energy, power, traffic control, crime, agriculture and health care. At the end of the day, the 15 ideas were selected by the delegates for the next round of the competition.
On the last day of the event, all 15 semi finalists were allowed to pitch their ideas and do a demo presentation to impress the judges. The judges selected 7 ideas to go to the final stage and 3 eventual winners. After deliberations, iGas an idea pitched by Team Config carried the day!
The first prize for the competition, a cash prize of 1 million Naira, donated by Access Bank Plc (@myaccessbank) was presented by the Access Bank Plc representative at the event. The second and third runners-up, would recieve mentorship by world class hardware engineers from Stanford amongst other valuable support for their ideas.
Lagos Labs was organised in partnership with Access Bank Plc, welldone.org (@welldone), Swift 4G LTE Nigeria (@swift4glte) and Cre8Space Lagos. This is the first Lagos Labs event and the organisers say there will be subsequent events where contestants will develop innovative solutions to the various challenges Nigerians face daily.
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