Presenting Hackathon Data for Design Research: A Transcript Dataset

Abstract

Hackathons are intensive design experiences during which teams identify a problem and rapidly develop prototypes of solutions. These events offer a promising venue for studying collaborative design: they are naturalistic, short term, and contained, which mitigates many of the drawbacks of traditional investigations in design research. The objective of this technical brief is to present and describe a transcript dataset of conversations collected from a hackathon team. The dataset includes a transcript of the verbal communication between a four-person hackathon team in the first 2 hours and 9 min of their collaboration. This portion of the design process, totaling 908 segments of speech, details the team’s problem exploration, brainstorming, idea selection, and premature team dissolution. This brief outlines the advantages of having rich transcript data freely available, with a specific focus on new research directions and impact. We include a qualitative analysis of the premature team dissolution, using inductive coding to explore goal misalignment, to provide further context of the collaboration captured in the transcript. We aim for this brief to encourage the use of these data for future investigations of design, teamwork, and hackathon phenomena, as well as act as an exemplar for future publications of open-access datasets.