All-nighters are not fun. Whether catching up on office work, studying for an exam or doing extra project research, they rarely feel productive.

However, for the last few years Science Hack Day has brought together scientists, developers and enthusiasts in a room for up to 24 hours to invent new solutions for everyday problems using science.

Last year teams worked over the two days to create a doorbell that links to your smartphone, a glove that writes text messages and a toaster that recognises people’s preferred cooking time.

The project is the brainchild of Irishman Jeremy Keith and former NASAasa employee Ariel Waldman.

“The thing that I always find interesting is that a lot of people go, ‘Oh my God, only 24 consecutive hours, how are we going to do anything?’” says Waldman. “Many people will, at midnight, realise that they just hit a dead end with what they’ve been doing and they create something wonderful in three to six hours that’s even better than what they were originally working on. I think people surprise themselves a lot in terms of what you can prototype in fewer hours when put under a deadline.”

Science Hack Day is free and open to all, and part of the motivation for Ariel is seeing different disciplines connect to make such creations. "Getting an astrophysicist to play around with neuroscience is really cool and interesting. It's something where it's agnostic towards education and more about playing with things they don't know anything about."

Waldman and Keith met during a Texas expo in 2010, where Waldman had put together a panel about her frustration over how little "open" scientific information was being used by people. Keith was in the audience, and the panel motivated him to start the first Science Hack Day in London.

After seeing its success, Waldman decided to continue where Keith left off and began her own Hack Day in San Francisco. "I competed with myself. I was convinced it was going to be this great thing and I had to jump on it."

Science and tech

“When I did the first one in San Francisco, a lot of my motivation was the fact that in SF you have Silicon Valley,” says Waldman. “So you’ve got these science giants and tech giants. You would think there’s this wondrous creative overlap between the two industries [but] socially and professionally there’s just not. They don’t talk to each other.”

The event was a success and proved to Waldman that professionals wanted opportunities to mix with different minds.

"There's this infatuation with one another, but you can tell they don't overlap. There's just not that interaction occurring. Even to start an overlap socially is important, so Science Hack Day does that."

Fortunately for Ireland a more compact network of professionals boosts this social overlap, she says. "I think this is something where having a slightly smaller community is beneficial because you do get these creative collisions more."

It's a far cry from the Kansas native's beginnings. Waldman studied art in college and later found herself working in an ad agency as a digital anthropologist. After seeing the 2008 documentary When We Left Earth about the Apollo missions, she wrote to Nasa volunteering her expertise.

Collaboration

“I think for once in my life it was just a serendipitous moment, because when I emailed them they had just created a job description that day,” she says. The position was for Nasa’s CoLab initiative, which aimed to boost collaboration between the public and astronomers. The position, says Waldman, “read like my resumé”.

“They specifically wanted someone who had no experience with Nasa whatsoever to help bridge that gap. When I stumbled into Nasa it was sort of eye-opening to me. I had just never considered science and space and all that stuff, and it was just completely different.”

There she started spacehack.org, a website directory where people can find out how to assist in astronomical research. The experience gave Waldman inspiration to bring the idea of “open source science” to the world.

“I was interested in getting people the same experience as I had, where it was like no matter where you are you can actively contribute to science and space exploration in a meaningful way,” she says. “A lot of what I do is just focusing on talking to people who might not self-identify as a space or science geek, because I certainly didn’t before working at Nasa.”

Her work promoting Science Hack Day has taken her all over the world as events get set up in places as far apart as Mexico, China and Madagascar. "The thing that I've been delighted about is that everywhere across the world everyone is equally geeky," she says. "That doesn't change. People in Madagascar created the exact same geeky things you would see in San Francisco."

For Waldman, events like these help to remedy the frustration she felt in 2010 about the lack of engagement with scientific information. Having a variety of experts tackle these problems, she says, shows just how approachable science can be.

"I think what's more important is to show that science isn't just an on/off switch. It's something more nebulous and you can actually play around with it and you can make contributions to it even if you're doing a completely different career. Science Hack Day isn't about acquiring more people to pursue science as a career, it's about saying, 'You can still play around with this stuff'."

Playing around with science and breaking down perceived barriers to science remains a priority for Waldman as she continues to showcase how open science can be for everyone.

“I think there needs to be a lot more respect for where people are at any given point. It’s important to talk about limiting barriers to people who know what they want to do . . . but so many other people are on a nebulous journey.”

The next Science Hack Day is on November 14th-15th. More information from sciencehackdaydublin.com