Hackathons as Participatory Design

Abstract

Breastfeeding is not only a public health issue, but also a matter of economic and social justice. This paper presents an iteration of a participatory design process to create spaces for re-imagining products, services, systems, and policies that support breastfeeding in the United States. Our work contributes to a growing literature around making hackathons more inclusive and accessible, designing participatory processes that center marginalized voices, and incorporating systems-and relationship-based approaches to problem solving. By presenting an honest assessment of the successes and shortcomings of the first iteration of a hackathon, we explain how we restructured the second Make the Breast Pump Not Suck hackathon in service of equity and systems design. Key to our re-imagining of conventional innovation structures is a focus on experience design, where joy and play serve as key strategies to help people and institutions build relationships across lines of difference. We conclude with a discussion of design principles applicable not only to designers of events, but to social movement researchers and HCI scholars trying to address oppression through the design of technologies and socio-technical systems.

"The Personal is Political"

“…Aligned with the principles that underpin feminist consciousness raising, our qualitative methods aim to explore the individual and collective experiences, changing perceptions, and relationships developed by participants in a hackathon about breastfeeding organized by the authors of this paper. We have described the process and design principles behind the event in our work "Iterating Feminist Utopias" [54]. While hackathons have been evaluated on their entrepreneurial and learning outcomes, there has been less work examining personal impacts, including shifts in perception, development of relationships and transformation in political consciousness resulting from hackathons.…”

“…Only one interviewee had a professional identity as a designer. It may be important to note that the hackathon had its own design principles guiding selection of participants described in [54] and it was deliberate in its incorporation of professional expertise and parent perspectives. While we selected participants to represent a range of perspectives at the hackathon, they do not represent all perspectives from the event and the hackathon itself was not representative of the U.S. population.…”

“…Our prior work has described the design principles we used in organizing a large-scale, equityfocused breastfeeding hackathon [54]. Here, we follow-up on that work with analysis of in-depth interviews with ten participants in that event, along with interviews with organizers of innovation events in the postpartum health domain (2 interviews and 1 focus group).…”

Troubling Design

“…Common for these feminist practices is that they bring feminist values and theories into conversation with design research and practice, questioning what it means to design for and with people whose lives are affected, and the role that technologies play herein. This includes how designers advocate for equality and justice through design [Costanza-Chock 2018;Hope et al 2019], norm-criticism [Ehrnberger 2017], self-disclosure and reflection on positionality, bias and privilege [Bardzell 2010; Prado de O. Martins 2014; Søndergaard and Hansen 2017a], woman-centered design [Almeida et al 2018], designing for marginalized and ignored areas of women's health , and attending to situated knowledges and pluralism [Suchman 2002;Bardzell 2010].…”

“…Pluralism is closely linked to feminist trouble as it too resists fixed entities and binaries. Feminist HCI has had a great impact on the HCI field and inspired an increased attention to women's health experiences such as breastfeeding [Balaam et al 2015;Hope et al 2019], intimate care , menstruation [Fox et al 2018], menopause [Bardzell et al 2019;Tutia et al 2019], sexuality [Bardzell and Bardzell 2011], and given rise to attention to gender issues in technology use and design [Strengers et al 2019;Søndergaard and Hansen 2018]. These topics may bring trouble in the ways that they require designers to research and develop technologies in tabooed and sensitive areas.…”