A designer plays an important role in making your project look desirable and hence often people perceive a good product design to be functional in nature too in a hack. Now Hacks are very exhausting and Starting everything from scratch from a basic rough idea to an actual prototype, a designer gives the vision to it.
There can be a lot of helpful resources that can play a great role during hacks(i.e 36hrs or 48hrs hacks, etc). Often some designers tend to work from scratch and end up project being incomplete.
Ideation and research are some of the most difficult parts of the hack, which makes your project ask how and why of it, which makes it unique from others. (Depends on the hack type)
To make the work easier for developers too, designers can use some particular resources to automate the process during development:
Anima | Design to development platform
Ex.