- Hi everyone, I'm Alexis Hope and--
- I'm Josephine Hoy.
- And our paper is Hackathons as Participatory Design
Iterating Feminist Utopias.
As a collective, we run Hackathons under the name
"Make the Breast Pump Not Suck."
First in 2014 and again in 2018, so this paper reports on
both events explaining how iteration on the first
led to the second event.
Not all of our co-authors and organizing teammates
were able to be here today,
but I wanted to introduce you to them.
We have Rebecca Michelson, Catherine D'Ignazio,
Jennifer Roberts, Kate Krontiris, and Dr. Ben Zobeard.
We also want to acknowledge that this work
was made possible by the staff of the MIT media lab
and countless volunteers, so it's a really--
quite a large project.
- So we also want to give a nod to prior work within the CHI
and ACM community that has explored motherhood and HCI,
various breastfeeding-supportive technologies,
and also prior qualitative research
that led to our first Hackathon in 2014
that was reported on at CHI in 2016.
- So our first Hackathon was inspired by questions like,
"Whose futures are being considered and invented
at institutions like MIT?"
"Who gets to participate at these imaginings of the future?"
"And who is missing from these conversations?"
So while a hackathon centering breastfeeding,
which is often stigmatized and overlooked
in technology spaces, inspired some exciting outcomes
of the 2014 event, support for breastfeeding
isn't just a matter of technological innovation.
Breastfeeding outcomes in the United States
are inextricably linked to systems of oppression,
so that's what makes it an economic and social justice issue
beyond just a matter of public health.
So 78% of parents in the United States are unable to nurse
for the recommended six months of an infant's life.
And to establish a milk supply, the parent and child
must stay close in the first few weeks of the baby's life.
This is very difficult in the United States,
which is the only industrialized nation
without federally-mandated paid family leave.
Only 14% of civilian workers in the United States
have access to paid family leave, and they tend to occupy
upper-income brackets.
So while breastfeeding is often presented as a personal
choice for someone whether they want to do it or not,
structural racism and other systems of oppression
in the United States have rendered it into a luxury good.
So it's more easily accessible to privileged families.
So as our organizing team of six women
reflected on the 2014 hackathons and it's limitations
as an event that was mainly focused
on technological innovation,
we revisited our questions and asked ourselves,
"Who's future's being invented, and who is not only missing
but excluded from this process and how can we iterate
towards addressing these systems of inequity?"
- So we've been really inspired by this quote
from our friends at the Equity Design Collaborative,
"Racism and inequity are products of design.
They can be redesigned."
The main point they make here is that racism and inequity
are both intentionally and unintentionally designed
in the systems and artifacts.
Intentionally, when we make choices to uphold or strengthen
systems of oppression, and unintentionally when designers
fail to reflect on their own positionality,
or take appropriate action to address resulting bias
and assumptions or to include the right participants.
We committed to using institutional resources to lift up
and connect to work already being done within communities
across the United States in support of breastfeeding,
and spent a year prior to the event building relationships
across many lines of difference including racial,
socioeconomic, geographic, and beyond.
So as we built relationships to make this new,
broader community possible, we also did a lot of work
in thinking about and confronting our own identities.
So we're a team of six women, and the four white members
of the team started to meet monthly for facilitated
conversations around whiteness, privilege,
confronting our own roles in propagating racial inequality.
This was deeply uncomfortable work.
We needed to learn to have authentic conversations
about the ways in which we continually mess up
when we don't consider power imbalances
that may not be apparent to us.
There are no easy answers we can provide
or a checklist for this.
It is ongoing work that is now a huge part of practice
for work we take on going forward.
So broadly, our work has been rooted in commitment
to feminist HCI, as a now expanding broad field,
and to honoring modes of thinking and outputs
that have been devalued by positivist
and solutionist models, including uplifting non-technical
approaches and partnerships between individuals,
institutions, and community activists as experts in their
own lived experiences and as co-designers.
We also want to acknowledge related work
exploring cultures of feminist maker and hackerspaces
which help influence the design of the event,
and are deeply indebted to feminist scholarship
by women of color and black feminist scholars.
We believe that as a team that the epicemic
and emancipatory commitment of feminism and feminist HCI
require that we uncompromisingly adopt
an intersectional lens and center the needs and problems
of those who are most disadvantaged, as Kimberly Crenshaw
said in 2005.
So our work is also influenced by equity, by design,
and design justice communities, and for this we were also
very inspired by Shaowen Bardzell's work in uniting
Feminist Utopianism and Participatory Design.
So we want to give a call out to some of those influences.
- So hackathons have distinct limitations
as a participatory model.
They've been widely critiqued for their exclusionary format
and for propagating reductionism and solutionism,
so these are all critiques we contend with.
Many remixes and reimaginings of the hackathon
have also been offered, for example,
by the Detroit Digital Justice Coalition
and Lauren L. Mccan.
Our 2018 event sought to build
on some of these reimaginings, and I'll share a couple
of the ways that we did this.
First, we focused on changing who was in the room.
So in the U.S., hackathons typically attract a mainly young,
white male technologist.
So while our first hackathon had many women and babies
in attendance, which is pretty rare for a hackathon,
it was still largely a white space.
So we changed the way we recruited
and advertised our hackathon so we could reach new audiences
both a more racially and socioeconomically diverse audience,
and also one that included many, many different skill sets
beyond just engineering.
We also raised significant funds to support the travel
of people who otherwise could not attend an event like this.
Because it's one thing to just invite people,
and quite another matter to make it possible
for them to attend.
So that was really important.
Hackathons are typically pretty competitive,
and we didn't want our space to feel like that
because we wanted to prioritize collaboration
and community-building and relationship-building.
So at our first event, we had traditional first, second,
and third place prizes, and we changed that with our second
event in favor of 12 relationship-based
and experiential prizes.
Things that would help people move their projects along
to the next level, which also encouraged groups
to help each other.
Lastly, since hackathons aren't known for producing
innovations that last beyond the two days,
we focused on making space both for newcomers
and new projects, but also finding a way to amplify
and support the ongoing work of people out in the world
who are doing work related to breastfeeding innovation.
So this we did through our community innovation program,
which was an added component to the 2018 event.
So we worked with community groups from around the country,
four who already working in their communities on
breastfeeding-supportive technologies and services
and programs.
So centers of innovations like MIT
and many of our own institutions that you would
be coming from, often overlook innovation work communities
are already doing to make the world better,
and we wanted to use our institutional resources instead
to uplift and support the critical work
that's already being done in the world.
So we worked with these teams for six months
prior to the hackathon to help them develop
some of their existing projects into something
that they could bring to the hackathon that could benefit
from using the resources and people available
over the weekend.
So each team consisted of talented innovators
and passionate advocates for low-income families
in their communities in Boston, Massachusetts;
Tupelo, Mississippi; Detroit, Michigan;
and Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Hackathons were new for members of our community innovation
program, and they served as key design partners for us
in rethinking the old hackathon model and transforming it
into something new that would actually work for them
and advance their work.
So the second, "Make the Breast Pump Not Suck" hackathon
drew about 250 people across all the events.
For about 75% of the people who came,
it was their first hackathon.
So we really had a great opportunity to reimagine
what this could be for people who were not sort of used
to the trappings of a traditional hackathon.
We really wanted to make it a joyful, playful,
and beautiful and welcoming experience for everyone,
so I'm going to show you some clips of some--a little bit
about what it was like and some folks in our community
talking in their own words about what they did at the event.
(upbeat music)
- I think our community innovation teams
are like the highlight.
- We have four community innovation teams coming from
Tupelo, Mississippi; Albuquerque, New Mexico;
Detroit; and Boston.
- The Harambee Care is a maternal infant health program.
The focus of our design is to insure that families have
access to timely lactation care.
- We are a nonprofit that works around birth
and breastfeeding equity for women of color.
What we are designing is a movement,
a entire social media platform.
- We are working on the Lac-Pac toolkit
which is an infant-feeding toolkit for disasters.
- Everybody who wanted to had a 60 second opportunity
to kind of tell the audience their wonderful idea
and invite other people to work with them.
(faintly speaking)
- And I pumped religiously for three months
for my quintuplets, carried them to full term.
So when that nurse told me she threw away the milk...
Ain't nobody got time for that.
(audience laughs)
- I'm excited about what will result
and also the partnerships that are formed here,
also the friendships and the networking and hopefully
that will continue after this event is over.
- I really don't know what to expect actually,
because one of the joys and magic of the hackathon
is that lots of people come together with different ideas.
We worked hard to provide whatever materials
they might need.
So there's going to be a sewing station,
and a 3D printing station, an electronics workbench,
and a whole bunch of materials, but I really don't know
what people will do with them and I'm really excited to see
what they come up with.
(upbeat music)
- And keynote did not show our captions on that video,
so if you come find us afterwards, we'll send you a link.
- So many amazing innovations came out of this event.
Way different than the innovative breast pumps
that turned out to be too expensive for most people
that came out of our first event,
because who was in the room was way different
than the first time, and the room was full of dedicated
people solving problems that they themselves faced
or the communities that they worked with had faced.
So one of my favorite examples briefly shown in the video,
this is the infant ready emergency feeding kit to support
breastfeeding in a natural disaster.
The New Orleans Breastfeeding Center produced this kit
and they just shared it with us a few days ago actually.
They've scaled up their prototype from the hackathon
into something they're now currently distributing across
New Orleans, a city which has faced
devastating hurricanes and floods.
So we're really excited to see things like this
make it out into the world.
Even though our team includes a lot of MIT nerds,
we still recognize that focusing on technology alone
will not help solve this problem.
So about 25% of people who gave birth in the United States
returned back to work within 10 days.
This is not enough time to heal, let alone build up
a milk supply for your baby.
So to complement the hackathon,
we pulled together a simultaneous convening called,
"Make Family Leave Not Suck" policy summit
which brought together policy leaders
to hack paid family and medical leave
which is inaccessible to about 85% of people
who give birth in the United States.
- So our 2018 hackathon was guided by a set of
five core design principles, but I'm going to highlight
three of them here.
The first was intentionally structuring equity,
because equity doesn't just happen
and it's a continual process not a destination.
The event also sought to leverage institutional power
trying to divert the brand and resources of MIT
to redistribute attention and resources to projects
that are often overlooked by these innovation cultures.
And finally, cultivating a spirit of joy and play
was an essential principle for the event,
because the work of confronting structural oppression
and dealing with sexism and racism is daunting in scope
and emotionally difficult and so is living under it.
Oppression is not an abstract problem to be solved,
but is real human experience and suffering.
We recognize the opportunities for joy and play
are not distributed equally,
but as a strategy of resistance, joy and play can offer
both a much needed respite and an opportunity to connect
across lines of difference.
- So we made a lot of space for joy and play at this event.
We had a beautiful art exhibition that was showcasing
this issue not just from a policy or product angle,
but one from human experience, so this space offered folks
a critical third space to connect and converse
with one another outside of having to be productive
at the event.
We baked 500 boob cupcakes in a variety of skin tones
to hand out to our participants.
We had a product expo with 30 companies large and small
showcasing their innovations all around a baby village
where people could hang out with their little ones
and have shared child care.
We had a "zine" library,
and we brought in plants and couches
to transform what was otherwise a very sterile tech space,
because we believe how people feel in their bodies
and in a space matters.
So all of these opportunities for play and reflection
allow people to open up creatively
and be generative of new ideas and solutions.
So the energy and silliness made the weekend a success.
However, our approach to joy and play
is reflected in this quote from a terrific book
called, "Joyful Militancy" by Nick Montgomery
and Carla Bergman.
It's, "For joy to flourish, it needs sharp edges."
So what does it mean for joy to have sharp edges?
For us it means that joy must not gloss over anger, pain,
grief in service of so-called harmony.
It means taking a stand and having boundaries,
refusing to compromise on certain values.
So in order to create an environment
that was truly warm and welcoming,
hackathon had many sharp edges.
So we chose to center women of color,
which means explicitly not centering
white women in our recruitment efforts
and who we selected to attend the event.
We asked everyone to uphold a set of community agreements
that we could hold each other accountable
for how we treated each other in the space
and we began the hackathon with a workshop on equity
in order to create a shared vocabulary
and understanding of how we might think about
and address our own biases in the room.
So theses were some of the sharp edges that allowed us
to make space for joy and play as a strategy of resistance.
Thank you.
(applause)
- Thank you, and again,
congratulations on, oh sorry...
And again, congratulations on the honorable mention as well.
(Applause)
- [Woman In Audience] Hi everyone, my name is Ari,
and I'm also from the MIT media.
Thank you so much, Alexis and Josephine,
for sharing this.
It's really inspiring to me.
I have a question on--I know you guys are trying
to put on another hackathon...
What do you think the issues are
trying to raise money for something that centers minorities
and sort of how do you get around that?
- Yeah that's a great question.
Our first hackathon was funded in large part
by the Kellogg foundation which I forgot to note,
so thank you for the opportunity to.
We are--we have found that,
at least for the breast pump issue,
it's such a niche technology that all of the companies
that are involved with that really wanted to participate,
because it's like the only event that was centered
on this piece of technology that is extremely neglected.
So one of our strategies is to try and find technologies
and services that are also more broadly neglected
and stigmatized so as with breastfeeding,
and our next hackathon focused on menstrual health,
so that's one of our strategies.
- [Man In Audience] Mumbles--Thanks again for the talk
and such amazing work.
I really appreciated the strategies that you listed
at the end and they totally make sense
given what you've described in the project.
I was wondering if you could list some of the tactics
that were used in the workshop
that would highlight kind of the differences
between a typical hackathon and this kind of work.
- Yeah, was there one in particular you were interested in?
- [Man In Audience] I mean anything that like--
I'm more interested in like tactics of
finding participation of these communities.
- Like specific things we did to--
- [Man In Audience] Yeah like an exercise
or a tactic--technique.
- I think it's so, I mean, the core of this work
is a year-long process of building relationships
with community groups so in terms of some of these things,
I'm not sure I could distill it down
to a specific tactic, but for some of these things
like intentionally structure equity,
some of our tactics for there
were having equity workshops to begin the hackathon itself
which doesn't always happen,
so we took an hour and a half outside of the process
instead of people kind of jump starting
with brainstorming ideas we said,
"Hey let's take a pause and talk about bias
and to talk about equity."
So that's one example.
I'm not sure if that answers you question but...
- So, yeah, sorry if there's any more questions.
I'm sure they'll be happy to answer at the end,
so thank you again to Alexis.