A group of ECU design students placed in the top three at an Adobe Creative Jam earlier this year for their Ripple Effect Campaign, which aims to harness the power of social media to grow communities around environmental causes.

Gavin Liang, Peter Ip and Kimberly Leung all graduated from the Interaction Design Certificate Program — now the User Experience (UX) Design Certificate — in 2020, at nearly the same moment as results were announced in the virtual design competition.

“As I think back, I remember how it felt very much like the perfect bookend to our program, as the winners were announced the same day we had our [ECU] Industry Night,” Gavin, who currently works as communications coordinator with youth-driven non-profit Check Your Head, recalls.

“To be able to apply all that we’d learned during the competition and have that be received so well really helped affirm that we were on the right track as new designers.”

Ripple Effect is a social media platform that allows users to apply eye-catching filters to photos, and upload them to an online hub populated by fellow users in support of a common cause. Users can customize their photos with stickers, and formally pledge to the campaign by adding their signature. The easy-to-use platform helps foster community around environmental activism, and create momentum for positive change in a digital-first world.

The project — which was developed start-to-finish in a short period of time in competition with more than a hundred other teams, all responding to a prompt issued by Adobe Creative Jam partner The Ocean Agency — was inspired by Greta Thunberg’s savvy use of social media to raise environmental awareness, the group says.

(Following Gavin, Peter and Kimberley's interviews for this story, the trio announced a further third-place finish in yet another remote design competition. You can read about the team's solution for the Product Design Competition — which challenged designers to develop an add-on for a smartphone app to help people consume water and electricity more efficiently — at ux.design.cc).

Gavin, Peter and Kimberly first met and began collaborating over the course of their six-month program at Emily Carr. While all of their school projects were completed individually, Kimberly and Peter began competing in ‘hackathons’ together fairly soon after meeting. While Gavin was too busy during the school year to join them for the intensive extracurricular design competitions, he was finally able to participate as the spring semester was coming to an end.

And according to the team members, their immediate success comes in large part from the mutual respect and understanding they’d established as peers at ECU.

“Even though our class assignments were worked on our own, during that time we also asked for each other’s opinions and talked through our individual challenges as designers,” says Kimberly, now in the last year of an undergraduate degree in Cognitive Systems and Biology, at UBC.

“We were able to establish trust and respect for one another, and get a grasp on the work habits we each have. So, when we worked together for the first time, it felt very easy and intuitive. Besides being teammates, we are also friends and I think that definitely helped with our team dynamic.”

Peter, who currently works at Shopify in product design on the Financial Services team, says the team’s work on Ripple Effect was infused by a spirit of open collaboration, allowing each member to naturally gravitate towards design tasks most suited to their strengths. Recognition at an Adobe Creative Jam, he adds, provides an enormous boost, given that the trio are all just starting out on their journeys as design professionals.

“Placing top-three in a competition that saw competitors from all over North America is very rewarding,” Peter says.

“It shows that, while we were entry-level UX Designers and beginners in design competitions, we have the skills and creativity to do great things in the future. It’s exciting to see our success because it allows us to be more confident in our design skills and in continuing to think outside the box.”

Gavin, Peter and Kimberly say they continue to work together as a team, with the aim of competing in further design competitions this year and beyond.

The Interaction Design certificate program enrolled its final cohort in Fall, 2020. If you are interested in studying interaction design, check out our new User Experience (UX) Design Full-time Certificate Program, or explore part-time studies through individual course offerings that can lead to a UX/UI Associates Certificate.