Building Code, Building Relationships

Hackathons are popular and innovative events organized to develop ideas related to a technological solution into prototypes in a short amount of time. There have been thousands of hackathon events held since their inception in the late 1990s. This thesis research explores how a people-centered design approach can be used to develop a team-building process or tool for shaping a meaningful hackathon experience. Literature suggests that interdisciplinary teams encounter challenges when attempting to build relationships in teams. Those challenges include communication and collaboration and are amplified due to the short working time frame of most hackathons. Exploring key factors that affect teams in hackathons and ways to mitigate those barriers is a challenge to identify in literature. Participatory design research methods are used to develop processes and tools that will encourage relationship-building between hackathon team members, particularly those who are new to hackathons or are unfamiliar with their team members. The goal of a people-centered design approach is to co-create an outcome that can be used at numerous hackathon events and potentially in additional contexts that require interdisciplinary collaboration. The results of this research include an effective team-building process for hackathons and a co-created tool in the form of a mobile application. The proposed team-building process is four steps: Introduce, Discover, Form and Collaborate. Hackversation, a mobile app, encourages individuals to connect and communicate with each other, based on their common interests. The app also recommends potential teams based on participants' challenge interest and requests for particular skill sets