Lilac: Breastfeeding Aid

During the Fall of 2018, I worked on designing a breastfeeding aid within the context of MIT’s 2.009 Product Engineering Processes class.

2.009 is a capstone design course where students learn to ideate, design, build, and present a brand new product by the end of the semester.

This popular class gives students a taste of real-world product development. Rather than running the class in a typical lecturer-student fashion, Prof. David Wallace acts as the head of a design firm, encouraging the teams to think of themselves as designers and the instructor and industry mentors as consultants and technical advisers.

The class culminates in a final presentation and product launch in a major end-of-semester event in the fall at Kresge Auditorium. During the event, each team reveals its alpha prototype and presents a business model to the audience to show the product’s viability in the market.

The team

Our team consisted of 22 mechanical engineering undergraduate students with skills spanning mechanical design, software development and product management. Along with Kyubin Lee, I acted as the System Integration Officer for my team, charting the roadmap for our product development process and ensuring communication between the different sub-teams.

Ideation

We started off with a simple, one-word prompt: DANGER!

Based on this theme, we tasked ourselves with brainstorming to identify various problem-spaces to design for. We brainstormed individually, then gathered to ideate collectively. Various contenders for a target problem-space emerged: Weight-lifting injuries, menstrual toxic shock syndrome, postpartum depression, physical disabilities, and more.

Using various decision-making strategies, we arrived at the following problem statement:

Problem Statement:

Due to issues such as cleft palate or tongue tie, 1 in 6 babies struggle to breastfeed. In addition to birth conditions that inhibit a baby’s ability to breastfeed, it is also common for nursing mothers to have difficulties breastfeeding too, as they may struggle with mastitis, clogged milk ducts, and sore nipples among other inhibiting factors.

Breastfeeding is an intimate experience that happens between a mother and her newborn, and sometimes the experience may be too trying or impossible. Consequently, parents may opt for an alternative option instead -- pumping breastmilk to then bottle feed their infants. While this process still delivers human breast milk to the child, it does not replicate the physical and intimate experience that is achieved during direct breastfeeding.

Our goal is to create a way for new parents to breastfeed their babies who have to rely on bottle-feeding, while allowing them to hold their babies in their arms.

Our Solution:

As a result, we created an assistive breastfeeding device that bridges the gap between direct breastfeeding and bottle feeding. The purpose would be to give a mother the option to be able to simultaneously pump and feed her baby, which would foster a close and intimate experience.

Prototype Development

Our product development process was inspired by the principles of User-centered Design and iterative prototyping.

We employed a variety of design ethnography methods to learn more about the pain-points mothers experience when attempting to breast-feed their children; We conducted user interviews, observations and usability testing with a variety of local mothers who reported difficulties breastfeeding.

Throughout the semester, I led the efforts of gathering user insight by recruiting over 20 recent mothers that have experienced issues with breastfeeding to better understand their needs and inform design requirements.

Several prototypes were developed and presented to breastfeeding mothers for usability testing to illicit their their feedback.

Here are some of the prototypes we developed throughout this iterative process.

Product Launch and Live Demo

You can watch our pitch at the live demo + Q&A below:

The Product