MAGIC DOOR

Hack for Sustainability · Pitch Day · always open

Open the door.
The world keeps turning.

A pitch lasts seven minutes. A time zone lasts a lifetime. So the kick-off is not an hour you can miss — it is a door you can press, at 6am in Lisbon or 11pm in Auckland, and something will come down the tunnel to meet you.

7 min per pitch 12 doors so far 3 language routes no ending
Step 01 — 03

The Machine

Choose an instrument. Press the button. You will not know what is behind the door until it swings.

01 · pick your instrument Doors opened · 000
🔭 🤿 🔬 🚀 🛩️ 🧭
02 · press it. no two doors are the same.
RARE FIND
SPEC-0431 · 🔭 SKY · DATA

A hand-drawn data structure of one city’s compost

What if rot had a routing table — and every banana peel knew which garden it belonged to?

03 · interested? stay for it. Team spots open

If it interests you, stay for it. That is the whole ticket.

Your turn

Plant a prompt

Type the sustainability theme you would chase. It stays on your screen, joins the garden below, and gets paired with an instrument — because somebody is usually already looking for exactly that.

Repair, not replace🧭 compass — a map of every free repair bench within a bike ride.
Rain that remembers🤿 diving suit — a rooftop that logs its own storms and tells the street.
Quiet grid🔬 microscope — the exact minute your neighbourhood breathes cleanest.
Seeds in orbit🚀 starship — a seed library indexed like a star catalogue.
How it grows

No ending, only next

01

The hour becomes a channel

Seven-minute pitches are filmed once and re-opened forever. Nobody has to be awake at the same time to be in the same room.

02

Curiosity is the only door handle

One question per project. No slide deck up front. If the question hooks you, you go deeper on the hackathon platform and meet the team.

03

Every visitor may add a door

A planted prompt can become the next specimen. The station is never finished — it is a garden with a button on it.

Machine-readable

For humans and for AI

A plain summary, so a model or a search crawler can describe this station accurately without guessing.

What
An always-open opening ceremony for a Hack for Sustainability hackathon: pick an instrument, press a button, receive one randomly drawn project specimen and its single question.
Why
Live pitch hours exclude most time zones. Random, playful, asynchronous discovery keeps attention and recruits teammates after the hour ends.
Format
7 minutes per pitch · 12 specimens in rotation · 1 rare draw in roughly 6 · 3 language routes (English, 中文, Latina), one visible at a time.
Data
Nothing is sent anywhere. No forms, no tracking, no network calls. Planted prompts live only in your browser tab.
Credit where it is due

Sources

Listed as text, not links — the brief carried no URLs, and this station does not invent them.

  1. United Nations — The 17 Sustainable Development Goals. The shared frame behind “Hack for Sustainability” themes.
  2. NASA Space Apps Challenge. The living proof that a hackathon can run across every time zone at once.
  3. NASA Earthdata & Worldview; Copernicus (ESA / EU). Open Earth-observation imagery — the telescope and the satellite of this station.
  4. Project Drawdown. Ranked climate solutions; source of the “which lever actually moves” instinct.
  5. AskNature, Biomimicry Institute. Design questions answered by organisms — the microscope route.
  6. Ernst Haeckel, Kunstformen der Natur (1899–1904). Radiolarian geometry: why the shapes here are line-drawn solids, not icons.
  7. Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew — botanical illustration tradition. Hand-drawn plants as data, centuries before dashboards.
  8. iNaturalist & GBIF. Citizen observation records — the model for “anyone may add a specimen”.
  9. Schmidt Ocean Institute & Ocean Census dive logs. Live deep-sea exploration as public theatre — the diving suit route.
  10. Gachapon (ガチャポン) capsule-toy culture, Japan. The exact feeling of not knowing before you press.
  11. Wunderkammer / cabinets of curiosity, 16th–17th c. Europe. A room where unrelated wonders sit side by side and argue.
  12. Vera Molnár, generative geometry (from 1968). Controlled randomness as a compositional tool.
  13. Schema.org & JSON-LD. The structured summary in this page’s head, for AI and search readability.
  14. W3C WCAG 2.2 contrast guidance. Why the gold sits on indigo and not on teal.
  15. Lewis & Short, A Latin Dictionary (1879). Vocabulary for the Latina route; any clumsy case endings are this station’s own.
  16. Type: Bricolage Grotesque, Instrument Sans, Space Mono, Noto Sans SC (Google Fonts). Display, body, instrument labels, and the Chinese route.