AGORA APP: Product of the Equity by Design 2016 Hackathon

This year I had the opportunity to attend the 2016 AIA Convention as a speaker, talking about the path to licensure and as a scholarship recipient at the Equity by Design Hackathon!

At the Hackathon I paired up with Julia Mandell, Amy Kalar and Obi Okolo. Throughout the afternoon our “hacking” led us to AGORA – an app that mashes up yelp, geolocation and cloud-based building information modeling. It’s a feedback software application that would link public comments about buildings to spatial tags within buildings. The app would also provide information on how the building came together – the people and the processes behind the design (that’s you, architects!). We’re not coders and the hackathon only lasted an afternoon, so for the time being we let go of the technical specifics and focused on the experience we wanted to facilitate.

We wrote an in-depth piece about our experience for the Equity by Design blog. Check it out to learn about our team’s full experience. Plus, a SXSW Eco team member heard our pitch at the hackathon and asked us to submit our idea for their Place by Design Competition. We’re excited to see where this potential opportunity leads us!