A team of Master of Design students from Emily Carr University of Art + Design (ECU) recently won top prize at the Eunoia UX Design Jam at Simon Fraser University.

Design student Asad Aftab (MDes 2025) says his team was thrilled at the recognition, especially given the time pressure of the four-day marathon event.

“We almost felt like maybe we didn’t do enough, that we didn’t build out the features enough, that we didn’t have enough time,” Asad says, noting Eunoia takes place during the final weeks of spring term when students are already intensely busy with schoolwork.

“But the feedback from the judges was just incredible. They all said the same thing: the features we created for their platform were high-impact and required a low work input to implement. They said we took the best parts of what a social media platform can be and melded them into their platform for user-experience [UX] designers.”

The annual Eunoia UX Design Jam brings together upper-level design students to work on design problems for real clients. Each team is given the same problems to solve, competing to see who can develop the best solutions. While the entire event takes place over a week, teams have only four days to build and create their projects. The rest of the week includes opening and closing ceremonies and a period for judges’ deliberation.

The client for Eunoia 2024 was a company called UXwasHere — an online community for UX professionals. They asked Eunoia participants to develop features for their site that would encourage user retention and build a more resilient community.

Asad entered the competition as part of a team with three other students from ECU’s Master of Design program: Rebecca Zhong (MDes 2025); Lillian Zhaotong Chen (MDes 2025); and Yining (Jo) Zhou (MDes 2025). Despite a full workload at ECU, Asad says he and his team members wanted an opportunity to apply their degree-learning in a context outside the university.

“It’s like a real-world UX problem as opposed to just doing a case study on your own,” Asad says of Eunoia. “You get to talk to people who are not designers, you have to figure out what they want. And as somebody who recently moved to Vancouver, it was a great opportunity to meet a really good mix of people — students, professionals, the judges — who share the same interests and vision.”

Features that Asad’s team proposed included a unified tagging system for posts, a skillshare feature, an event-hosting feature, portfolio peer-reviews and a system for improving verification of user credibility. He notes the four-day event was the shortest timeframe anyone on his team had ever worked within. But that pressure delivered “great lessons about what’s important if you only have a short time to focus.”

Hackathons like Eunoia and the recent inaugural FLUI hackathon at ECU “are just incredible opportunities,” Asad continues.

“Even if you don’t win, that’s fine. It’s about the journey. Getting the chance to work in teams on real-world problems, meeting new people and networking with industry — there are so many opportunities to grow your community and work on yourself. These events are just a great thing.”

Visit ECU online to learn more about studying Interaction Design and in the Master of Design program at Emily Carr.