Hackathons are short-term events at which participants work in small groups to ideate, develop and present a solution to a problem. Despite their popularity, and significant relevance to design research, they have only recently come into research focus. This study presents a review of the existing literature on the characteristics of designing at hackathons. Hackathon participants are found to follow typical divergence–convergence patterns in their design process throughout the hackathon. Unique features include the initial effort to form teams and the significant emphasis on preparing and delivering a solution demo at the final pitch. Therefore, hackathons present themselves as a unique setting in which design is conducted and learned, and by extension, can be studied. Overall, the review provides a foundation to inform future research on design at hackathons. Methodological limitations of current studies on hackathons are discussed and the feasibility of more systematic studies of design in these types of settings is assessed. Further, we explore how the unique nature of the hackathon format and the diverse profiles of hackathon participants with regards to subject matter knowledge, design expertise and prior hackathon experience may affect design cognition and behaviour at each stage of the design process in distinctive ways.

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Hackathons are short design events at which participants collaboratively progress through the entire design process. They pose opportunities for design research, but the existing research is limited, as is the understanding of design activity at hackathons. In our study, we summarize the hackathon design process of 10 interview participants from varying disciplines, levels of experience, and hackathon events. The summarized account reveals a decreased emphasis on the beginning phases of the design process, mainly problem definition, but an increased emphasis on the end, specifically the pitch portion of the event. These differences are mainly due to the limited time frame. We further assess the effect of time limitations at hackathons by comparing hackathons to other instances of design, emphasizing the impact of time constraints on iteration. We conclude our discussion with an exploration of the role expertise has on the design process by comparing the accounts of designers and developers.

is a Continuing Lecturer in the Department of Management Sciences at the University of Waterloo. She has taught and coordinated the capstone design courses in the Management Engineering program since 2011. She also teaches courses in organizational theory, technology, and behaviour. Her research falls in the areas of design cognition and processes, engineering design education, and gender issues in STEM disciplines. She is interested in innovations in engineering design pedagogy, problembased learning, and effective teamwork in student teams. After completing undergraduate studies in electrical engineering, she continued on to earn a Masters and then a doctoral degree in management sciences, all from the University of Waterloo.

Conflict can be both a productive and detrimental reality of design collaboration. While most studies on conflict characterize findings by type (conflict about the task, process, or interpersonal relationships), we extend this typology to understand the causes, topics, and outcomes of conflict. To do so, we analyze communications in a virtual chat platform, collected in a hybrid work environment. A thematic analysis on over 6000 messages between student design teams on the enterprise communication platform Slack revealed three emergent conflict themes: Engineering Design, Project Management, and Communication. A mapping of the themes to a widely-cited typology of conflict found an over- representation of task (productive) and process (detrimental) conflict in the Engineering Design and Project Management themes, respectively. The distribution of types of conflict in the Communication theme is representative of the entire dataset, suggesting that communication can be a cause and outcome in all types of conflict. Overall, our classification of conflict is the first step towards describing triads of the causes, topics, and outcomes of conflict, a contribution which will drive the development of interventions for design team conflict.

is a MASc student in the Department of Management Sciences at the University of Waterloo. Her current research area is engineering design education with specific interest in design cognition. Her future work will focus on the intersection of data and design.