MedHACK : Enabled — Reflections and Why Disability.
48 hours, 154 tickets sold, 30 mentors and judges, 5 co-designers, and a 20+ strong team of volunteers later, and MedHACK : Enabled is a wrap.
Done.
Bish, bash, bosh.
Yes, the feedback on the whole has been great. I’ve said my thank yous, shed my tears and there’s a certain afterglow of exhausted satisfaction you get when you can sit back weeks later and can safely say:
‘I had a vision. I mapped it out. I executed. It was pretty good.’
As a collective, us, the MYMI team; we’re asking and doing what’s next. Looking at what to improve, and taking MedHACK concepts forward. There’s been a total of 5 teams and concepts so far that have expressed interest. We’ll see what unfolds over the next 6 months.
Carpe, fucking diem as I like to say.
So whilst we’re documenting processes, preparing for the future, I think it’s important to capture the emotional journey of how MedHACK came to be.
There’s enough resources out there to run events such as these. But there’s nothing out there that articulates the emotional ups and downs of bringing something near and dear to your heart to life. And I really think there’s where the real lessons are.
7 months ago, around the time I started MYMI, the idea of MedHACK coalesced. A structured event exploring disability, and using the hackathon process to experientially teach concepts of human centred design and collaboration.
Why Assistive Tech & Disability?
For me it was mix between the personal and the strategic.
The Personal
Let me preface this that I have no personal lived experience with disability. Even saying that feels problematic because it feels like disability is something that is ‘other’, or separate. So I suppose I mean that everyone lives their own normal, and the spectrum of my needs have not crossed over to what society deems as disability.
However, I had family members and people close to me who were considered disabled. For a large portion of my formative years, I lived with an uncle who was visually impaired. Simple things like learning how to lead and guide via touch and calling out food based on clock faces was pretty commonplace.
The high school I went to growing up in Malaysia was atrocious with accessibility as well. Back then, I had a classmate who was wheelchair bound, and the school had no facilities for wheelchair access whatsoever.
For 2 years, my friend and I would take turns, carrying her, wheelchair and all, up 2 flights of stairs to lab classes and other classrooms around the school, every day, Monday to Friday, without fail.
I like to believe those experiences planted the seed for my passion for inclusive design and biomedical engineering. It’s funny now to think that 7 years later I would be able to share that passion with over 200 like-minded people.
The Strategic
At MYMI, we tend to say that we’re passionate about achieving social impact through MedTech and healthcare innovation. I didn’t want to play lip service to that, and I felt that embedding that ethos from the start was crucial in how MYMI would play out 3–6 years down the line. I wanted to embed values of empathy, care and collaboration into the backbone of MYMI and I felt that the experience of both organising the hackathon, finding and working with our co-designers and being intentional about shaping culture within my team would go a long way to achieving that.
Thus, MedHACK is supposed to be as my co-founder Santi would call it, MYMI on steroids. It’s the evocative distillation of what we’re about, what we do and what we believe in. In some ways I think we succeeded, but there’s still work to be done.
This is the first time I’ve felt how my skills (as an engineer) can directly effect someone’s life. — MedHack Participant
Some stuff that happened there sounded like it would genuinely change the life trajectories of some of the particpants. — MedHACK Mentor
The students I met are the kind that really want to make a difference in this world . It was amazing to meet them, and they are truly going to shake things up. — MedHACK Co-Designer
Good start though.
I also deeply feel that the teaching of hot topic concepts such as human centred design, collaboration and entrepreneurship ( I hate that word actually) only work if there are emotional drivers involved. Humans are deeply emotional and I am a prime example. Being able to viscerally see how what you’re working on can directly touch someone’s life is powerful, and being able to get live feedback is so, so important in the process.
Once you get those hooks in, it becomes personal. Once it’s personal, then the learning becomes natural and easy and suddenly, of profound importance. The frameworks that we provide become points of reference, serving to guide and not to confine. My failing in this was not being explicit about this with participants. Yes, we’ll work on this next year.
Lastly, the thing with assistive technology and inclusive design is that it need not be super, super high tech. What’s required is usually creativity, clever thinking and a lot of bright minds approaching things from different perspectives. This really lends well to a hackathon environment. They’re intense, short bursts of restrained and focused creativity, and low barrier for entry tools such as arduinos, microbits, Play-Doh and other relatively cheap prototyping tools can be stretched a long way in getting ideas and concepts across.
I’ll say this right now. I deeply wish we had a co-designer on the organising team with us throughout the process of creating MedHACK. We consulted with people early and constantly throughout the process. But there were so many blindspots as a team, that having someone at arm’s reach who was on our team that could guide and shape us along the way would have been invaluable.
Data privacy, human ethics, the climate and conversation in the disability sector in general were among the roadblocks that we had to grapple with.
There were also issues raised towards the end that we should’ve considered right at the beginning, inherent to the disability sector in Australia, that made me question the ethics of what we were doing or whether I was leading my team into a PR disaster.
And whilst I had to put up a controlled and confident front for everyone else, my inner checks and balances threatened to derail things. My initial drive and bright eyed wonder would often give way to instances of self doubt. Doubt as to my intentions, my reasons for doing all of this, and whether I was up to the task.
Having good intentions is all fine and dandy, but so many things inherent with social impact lie in the ability to just shut up and listen, and I constantly need to remind myself of that.
It’s not about you, Darren. It’s never been about you.
But when you’re trying so hard to bring something close to you to life, it really is quite personal. And when it’s personal, your ego is tied up into it. Not in the sense of self-pride, but really that core sense of self. MedHACK was personal for me. It felt like I was putting myself on the line, being vulnerable every time I talked about it, pitched it, wrote about it or did anything related to it.
Couple that with a very self-critical, analytical and perfectionist nature (I’ve gotten better, I promise), and.. you get the idea. I might or might not also have a bit of a chip on my shoulder, but it is what it is.
Fast forward to now though, and I am deeply glad that we did it.
Putting MedHACK on whilst building MYMI, driving it with one eye on the future and another on being deliberate in our efforts to change the conversation surrounding student led initiatives has been one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do. Doing it whilst doing a full time study load and working part time has taken a bit of an emotional toll. But it’s been great, feeling just stretched just out of my comfort zone into the learning zone.
At the end of 2018, I considered taking up the President role at my previous student society. I decided against it because I felt it would stifle the growth of others and I wouldn’t learn as much. It’s part of the reason why I chose to start MYMI. New challenges and all that. Looks like I found a challenge that I really am relishing.
So what’s next?
MedHACK is merely part of a larger plan that we as a team have for MYMI and the ecosystem we seek to build in general. Currently we’re working with teams interested in developing their ideas further to help push them to bring ideas to reality, and hopefully to market.
As mentioned, a total of 5 teams have put up their hands so far. We’re organizing capstone projects, beginning patent searches, the nitty gritty of bringing things to life.
That’s really cool, in my opinion.
We’ll see what happens as we look to join the dots, make connections and introductions and gently nudge people on their way.
But it really is exciting to see bits of pieces of the vision coming into focus.
There’s still so much to unpack from MedHACK though, and I’d like to explore that further as I’ve had time to process and consolidate.
Thoughts on being deliberate in shaping marketing to educate and inject values to ensure, intentionally, that participants who came in were coming in the right frame of mind. More thoughts on cutting tension through MC-ing, dropping subtle nods to shared bonds to build inclusive culture. And also, more thoughts on the design of MedHACK, from our development of personas that helped shaped our messaging, to further mapping out the anticipated emotional journey of our attendees in order to be fully deliberate in pacing the event.
Why would you ever want to have a paper plane competition in the middle of a hack? Well, It’s for good reason.
I’m really glad you stuck around till the end. If you’re interested in following the MYMI journey, feel free to follow us on our socials. If you’d like to work with us, mentor a group of incredibly talented students, or have a piece of feedback you’d like to put forward (please do.) , feel free to email us at info@mymi.org.au
Till then, adios. Santi and I have a half marathon to run. Quite literally. :)
