DESIGN INCLUSION AND WHY IT MATTERS AT THE ALLIED MEDIA CONFERENCE
The Allied Media Conference (AMC) was held this year from June 14–17 at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. The conference brings together technologists, podcasters, community activists and organizers, non-profits, and policy think tanks to discuss how advances in technology can improve our communities. Whether from participants come from the West coast, East coast, or somewhere in between, AMC makes the connection between the grass-roots, boots on the ground organizations and the national reach of the larger non-profits. AMC was celebrating its 20th anniversary, marked by its highest attendance of over 3,000 attendees.
Media Democracy Fund and summer fellows at AMC
For those who come from a technical and academic background, AMC is a conference like no other. The organizers go out of their way to make everyone feel empowered to be agents of change in their communities and included in the conversations required to implement that change. From the numerous gender-neutral bathrooms to meditative and safe spaces to accessible accomodations at every session, AMC is truly a place where everyone and anyone can feel free to be themselves, and ask for the support that they need to be better advocates and organizers without judgement or shame. Its optional reduced registration fee and affordable conference lodging ensures that financial insecurities do not prevent anyone from joining the conversation.
One of the most memorable sessions for me was the Two Breast Pump Hackathons and Counting session with the team behind the MIT Make the Breast Pump Not Suck Hackathon. The session was part of the Design Justice Track and focused on how communities are excluded or harmed as the result of design. It questioned how we can redesign the process to incorporate these voices and develop more inclusive design practices.
Images from the hackathon. photo credit: https://medium.com/make-the-breast-pump-not-suck-hackathon/who-won-at-the-2018-make-the-breast-pump-not-suck-hackathon-c9f5e3814cae
Typically, the word hackathon conjures up images of a computer lab with students, mostly male, staying up all night, with pizza, chips and soda around their glowing screens, geeking out over an app they developed. To focus an entire hackathon around the breast pump bucks the norm and challenges our notion of what computer science can accomplish.
Catherine D’Ignazio set the scene by describing her experience at the MIT Media Lab, having to sit on the bathroom floor to breastfeed her newborn. To be in an elite institution and taking care of her child in this manner, she thought there must be a better way. So, she began to organize the first-ever hackathon for the breast pump. This hackathon would have to be structured differently than a traditional one. It needed to be a space where everyone, no matter their level of technical skill, would feel comfortable. Success depended on bringing in stakeholders from various fields including the breast pump manufacturers themselves, smaller breast pump start ups, women who are nursing, and lactation specialists. Ensuring diversity and inclusion in the work group was of the utmost importance. In total, the first hackathon consisted of over 150 participants, generated 9 team projects, resulted in 2 peer-reviewed research publications and over 90 press articles.
Summary of how Make the Breast Pump Not Suck Hackathon differs from traditional hackathons
After the success of the first hackathon, the team called for design suggestions where they received over 1,200 lengthy responses from women across the nation. The design flaws were not limited to the breast pump itself, but the environment for breastfeeding in the United States. From access to lactation specialists, to shame for breastfeeding in public or at work, the comments revealed that context matters. It would not be enough to redesign the breast pump itself, but there was also a need to address the climate in which women are participating in this necessary action. This led to the inclusion of the policy summit to the second hackathon.
One of the products of the hackathons was this collection of stories that give context to breast pump use in the United States. Photo credit: https://www.makethebreastpumpnotsuck.com/researchandstorycollection/
The many failings of the field and ability of D’Ignazio’s team to bring various stakeholders together to generate solutions should serve as an example for other industries. How many other “everyday things” are designed poorly that we just put up with? How many items are used exclusively by a small population, and thus its design or function is never challenged? If we invited more stakeholders into the design process, from beginning to end, what innovative designs could we produce? Who better to ask about the design of a product than the very people who use it everyday?
This session personified one of the many themes present at AMC: what information is lost when we silence populations? At AMC, these communities are given the platform to amplify their voices.
