Originally published on Medium with Make the Breast Pump Not Suck!

While there are many unique awards with individual criteria, here is the set of criteria applied across all projects, regardless of what award is being considered. We’ll post later about the full process and how we came to it.

• Whose voices are centered in this project? (Parents of color, low-income parents, LGBTQI+ parents, those in non-US geographies, other)
• How accessible is it likely to be to those who have been centered?
• How/are the emotional needs of the target audience being met? (Emotional needs might include “a soothing and calm environment so the parent can focus on thinking about their child.”)
• How/are the functional needs of the project’s user group being met? (A functional need might be “easy to clean parts so that bacteria does not grow.”)
• What organizational model is this group aiming towards (start-up, nonprofit, community org), and how viable is it in that model?
• How well does this project take historical context into account?

We have attempted to create a judging process which focuses on the process and equity, not on delivering a prototype. The creation of digital or physical objects is for the purpose of iterating through what might or might not work, not to produce something.