July 22, 2019 Topcoder’s Live User Experience at Water Innovation Festival Makes a Big Splash

Who says an event centered around water utilities can’t be fun, innovative and produce excellent real-time solutions to water problems? That’s what happened July 8 to 12 at the Northumbrian Water Group’s NWG Innovation Festival in Newcastle, United Kingdom.

Every year the NWG Innovation Festival hosts a series of sprints, data hack challenges and quests aimed at harnessing innovative genius related to water. This year, the festival planners upped the stakes by partnering with Topcoder to run a Live User Experience (LUX) design challenge during the five-day event, which included a focus on how to use food and technology to connect local and rural communities.

Live User Experience Focused on Outdoor Plant and Garden Systems

Northumbrian Water Group partnered with Topcoder to run a LUX design challenge for an app that would communicate with plant sensors to help growers and gardeners learn more about their water usage. The app would then be used to link individual growers, through the plant sensors, to create communities of growers that could interact and coordinate with each other as they grow plants. An app that monitors water flow, and coordinates water flow between different growers or within a community of growers is useful, especially when it comes to water rights and concern about water scarcity. The app enables a community of gardeners to link all of the sensors from their gardens, and also helps other communities like school groups, for example, to link together.

Competitors Worked Within Clear Challenge Parameters

Competitors were given 44 hours, between July 10 and 12, to work on the challenge. Seventy-five Topcoder members registered for the challenge with 68 members competing. Guidelines included producing layered PSD files created in Adobe Photoshop or similar programs, offering clean visuals and intentional color, and designing presentation screens that featured concepts for plant sensor apps that allowed users to display and share information.

You can view the full LUX competition spec here.

The Results of the LUX – Plantasium Mobile App Design Concepts Challenge

Every LUX design challenge yields dozens of fresh perspectives and design ideas that lead to smarter, more competitive results. Topcoder community members created innovative designs that demonstrated the power of crowdsourcing as a way to create quality results over a short period of time. Congratulations to every Topcoder community member that contributed and pushed the envelope to design smart, community-driven solutions. Congrats to our top 5 winners!

1st place winner: ToxicPixel – https://www.topcoder.com/members/ToxicPixel
2nd place winter: iamtong – https://www.topcoder.com/members/iamtong
3rd place winner: L.O.I – https://www.topcoder.com/members/L.O.I
4th place winner: yiming – https://www.topcoder.com/members/yiming
5th place winner: starck181995 – https://www.topcoder.com/members/starck181995

Check out the full LUX results:

LUX Partnership Was a Swimming Success

A big thanks to Northumbrian Water Group for the opportunity to partner with them at their 2019 NWG Innovation Festival. The LUX challenge generated on-site excitement while demonstrating the innovative power of crowdsourcing. The collaboration gathered the brightest minds in the innovation and tech industry to lend their expert thinking to solve problems related to water. We had a whale of a time!


George Gallant

Account Manager


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