My friends and I have slackathons where we just drink beer at a bar

Most hackathons could use good designers to help the results come to life. Depending on your area, you could try Startup Weekend. It doesn't hurt to reach out to hackathon coordinators and mention your interest.

Check out http://www.designjams.org/

• Elefint Designs puts on some cool designathons – hit them up!

• The Noun Project has done the occasional "iconothons".

• Future Partners and Project M will do sprints from time to time.

• The Designer Fund might do some – maybe you could reach out to them to put something together!

I would suggest you attend a "regular" hackathon as a designer. In my experience, not many designers go, which means whatever team you join will have a tremendous advantage.

There's also Pecha Kucha. http://www.pechakucha.org/

Hack@Brown is organized by students at both Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design. We're very design focused, and have tons of resources for designers to make the most out of a hackathon!

This includes design mentors, efficient team forming, as well as potential sponsorship from Apple, Adobe, Autodesk and so on. If you're a student, we probably will also have design recruiters at the event!

Follow us on Facebook and Twitter for more info closer to the hackathon. :)

There is Cut&Paste that runs the Digital Design Tournament, a live, competitive showcase held throughout the world each year. In addition, they also have smaller live and online challenges.

I've organized a couple Design Battles here in DC - have you ever tried putting on one of those? Although they're not the same as a hackathon, I think they're a great way to have some fun and bring attention to worthy designers who are competing under pressure to create the best design within the time limit. When I organized the first one in 2012, one of my main goals was bringing attention to some pretty incredible students that I went to school with. The next two have seen some surprising upsets, with emerging young designers making a name for themselves by winning these competitions.

You can check out what we did here: https://vimeo.com/40870475

Let's make our own Design Hackathons. My experience:

https://medium.com/monitise-create/dropbox-hackathon-bdc2c679b0c0

If you're in Chicago, check out hackathons thrown by MonkeyBars (www.monkeybars.io). They cater to both hackers and designers. They're throwing a hackathon tomorrow for Cisco's IoT World Forum that you should definitely check out if you're in the area!

http://hackathon.iotwf.com

I've heard of a few but they are definitely not commonplace. I would love to do one - even if it were a remote experience.

On a side note, if a company is hosting a hackathon for employees, is it pretty common that they do it for the purpose of generating new product ideas or is it more common that they hold them for the purpose of providing a fun experience to build things off of their technology, platform, or service?

If the former is the case, is that fair?

There is a Create Athon coming up near the end of October in Austin http://createathonaustin.org Looks like there may be others http://createathon.org

These help support non-profits who need marketing and collateral design help. It's then followed by http://austingivecamp.org which will do the same for charities but offer code help.

I'm on the fence but haven't committed yet.

Most hackathons are very welcoming to designers. I've been to three now (TNW Kings of Code, PennApps and HackTheNorth) and noticed a growing attendance of designers. It's also no problem finding a team that is looking for a designer since it gives a great edge over the projects. Design and UX seem to be part of the judging criteria almost anywhere.

While regular hackathons do have a focus on the technical and programming aspect of the event, there is a need for design in them. I am a designer, but i have attended several hackathons with developer buddies, and have had a blast under the tight time constraints to produce a great looking and intuitively functioning app or program. Just because there isnt a huge focus on the design doesn't mean that there isn't one.

I'll be attending Hack Manchester again this year, along with the ClockworkSMS skeleton crew:

If you're there, come say "hello" and grab one of these T-shirts.

How about layertennis.com? That's like an early iteration of a what a design-a-thon could be.

Seems like the assumption is that design isn't normally a part of hackathons? The winners from any hackathon always have some design thought going into it. Hackathons always have need for designers.