Draw This!

6pm, Sunday 19th April. A team of eight, who have never met in person, started screaming in elation at their crowdcast screens, throwing emojis into their collective workspace. The reason? Out of more than 200 original ideas and 46 finished pitches, they’d just been awarded first prize in New Zealand’s largest collaborative start-up event, #HacktheCrisisNZ, by a judging panel including Sir Stephen Tindall, Greg Cross, Lisa King, Mike King and Vic Crone for their weekend’s work – a fun-across-the-generations website, Draw This!

20% of people over the age of 65 in New Zealand experience loneliness and isolation. Social distancing during COVID-19 is exacerbating this problem and the latest figures from Research NZ show that 78% of respondents are concerned for elderly relatives and other relatives in different parts of the country. This issue was front-of-mind for Holly Grover, who came up with the idea behind DrawThis! by challenging herself to “build limitations and have a narrow problem to solve to begin with: engaging with elderly people using only a landline. The connection with kids came to mind, I think, because I was listening to my mum (a deputy principal) plan her lessons and so I came up with ideas for engaging kids remotely.”

Draw This! uses story-telling and art to build safe and fun connections across generations and between bubbles throughout New Zealand. It works like this. We collect short audio recordings from older adults, about something that a primary school child could draw- something like an object, a pet or a memory. We put it on the website for children to listen to, and then we send the drawings they make back to the older adults. It’s a safe, collaborative activity that provides purpose and fun, reducing feelings of loneliness and worry.

Throughout the weekend, Holly and the team - Brandon Kwong, Ruth Martin, Arthur Evstifeev, Yu-ching Lee, Harsh Singh Garcha, Medha Bandari and Liz Breslin - worked together in the same spirit. It’s a team that never would have met in traditional all-in-one-room hackathon conditions, connecting with each other while working on other people’s connections. “We were so excited to gather descriptions, and then get the first drawings in response,” Holly said.

This team of eight recent strangers are continuing, excitedly, to confer between their bubbles all over New Zealand, as to how to best reach isolated people who would get some joy out of this project. Thanks to the $5000 prize from #HacktheCrisisNZ, the expertise and encouragement of the mentors, and both public and private sector interest, they are feeling motivated and supported. And as Yu-ching said, “There's so much potential for Draw This! to also be something more than just a fun thing for kids and adults to do. The story-telling aspect of it enables us to capture the history of people and place, amongst other things.”

To hear the descriptions, see the gallery of drawing and try Draw This! for yourself, visit http://app.drawthis.nz/

To find out more about #HacktheCrisisNZ, see https://www.hackthecrisis.nz

About the team:

Holly Grover is a digital producer & experience designer. In her spare time she likes to play football, dance, and get out in the refreshing Wellington wind.

Yu-ching Lee is a junior UX designer and ex-pastry chef, based in Wellington.

Ruth Martin is an environmental protection researcher. She moved to Wellington from the UK 6 months ago after completing a social innovation fellowship.

Brandon Kwong moved to Wellington from Canada in 2018 and works in infrastructure advisory. He stumbled into the startup community through his first Kiwi friend (and Airbnb host) and hasn’t looked back.

Harsh S Garcha has worked in the banking sector and agile startups and is currently living in Mighty Waikato and working in Local Government.

Arthur Evstifeev is a software developer from Christchurch. He has been doing programming for over a decade and likes to tinker on small applications for himself and contribute to various open source projects, as well as hiking, playing computer games, reading and gardening.

Medha Bandari is a Year 9 student at Mt Albert Grammar School in Auckland.

Liz Breslin writes and edits things, works in events and as a students-in-the-community coordinator. She lives in the Upper Clutha.

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