FeedFinder

Abstract

Breastfeeding is positively encouraged across many countries as a public health endeavour. The World Health Organisation recommends breastfeeding exclusively for the first six months of an infant's life. However, women can struggle to breastfeed, and to persist with breastfeeding, for a number of reasons from technique to social acceptance. This paper reports on four phases of a design and research project, from sensitising user-engagement and user-centred design, to the development and in-the-wild deployment of a mobile phone application called FeedFinder. FeedFinder has been developed with breastfeeding women to support them in finding, reviewing and sharing public breastfeeding places with other breastfeeding women. We discuss how mobile technologies can be designed to support public health endeavours, and suggest that public health technologies are better aimed at communities and societies rather than individual.

Hackathons as Participatory Design

“…Prior work at CHI has explored motherhood and HCI [7] as well as breastfeeding-supportive technologies and services. Examples include the development of a low-cost system to monitor breast milk pasteurization for milk bank donation [19]; Feedfinder, a digital application that helps parents find, review, and share public spaces amenable to breastfeeding [6]; and the process of co-design with breastfeeding mothers to create Milk Matters [59], a mobile application designed to encourage breastmilk donation.…”

Supporting the Complex Social Lives of New Parents

“…Descriptions of technological interventions that consider how difficult this transition is have been gaining interest in HCI research [8]. Considerations have included: how the everyday burdens parents face should influence the design of an infant monitoring system [20]; how breast pumps can be better designed to fit into mothers' lives [14]; and how the design of a breastfeeding support system is greatly improved by deliberately engaging with the felt life of breastfeeding mothers [7,38]. Additionally, social-sharing interventions for parents have appeared within HCI scholarship, including a device for helping parents manage their online presence [42], a system that helps mothers share the physical experience of their pregnancy [21], and a social network for helping single parents connect in person to other parents in their area [5].…”

Between Grassroots and the Hierarchy

“…The introduction of the Local Offer invokes numerous aspects of recent HCI research: the development of information services for specific underserved populations [3]; the use of data generated by such services to support advocacy and service improvement [14,15,37,42]; bringing together diverse groups of actors and creation of publics around digital data and information [33]; and to bridge gaps between consultation exercises and decision making [26]. However, unlike work thus far in HCI, much of these community-oriented attributes of the Local Offer come from a top-down agenda from central government in the form of legislation.…”

“…The field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) has a growing interest in technologies for civic participation that promote bottom up processes in communities [3,17,18,43,47]. Recent work evidences a 'civic turn' in the field [5,27] that privileges citizen voice and empowerment, and the expansion of 'digital civics' as a field of enquiry [2,38].…”