PHOTOGRAPHS BY CHE-WEI WANG

When the Make the Breast Pump Not Suck! hackathon, a collection of roughly a hundred and fifty engineers, designers, midwives, and parents, began on Saturday morning at M.I.T., the atmosphere was part revival meeting, part product launch. Women and men clapped and whooped; babies yowled. ("This hackathon is great. There's like forty percent women, forty percent men, and twenty percent babies," one participant tweeted.) Participants were eager to reinvent the breast pump, one of the most loathed trappings of modern motherhood, and their initial ideas ranged from a bra with a hidden compression-pumping system to an app that would monitor milk production and offer customized pumping tips.

Last March, a headline on the Times' Motherlode blog asked, "Shouldn't the Breast Pump Be as Elegant as an iPhone and as Quiet as a Prius by Now?" The authors of the post, referring to Gloria Steinem's essay "If Men Could Menstruate," suggested that many of the breast pump's inadequacies could be blamed on institutional sexism. (If men used breast pumps, they wrote, pumps would be as quiet as a Prius.) In the U.S., as Jill Lepore observed in the magazine in 2009, pumps have become a substitute for adequate maternal leave. Today, they provoke a sort of impotent consumer hatred—even high-end breast pumps are noisy, bulky, and awkward to use, and pumping is sometimes painful, often boring, and never dignified. Not surprisingly, many women who attempt to pump at work wean their infants before the six-month mark recommended by pediatricians.

Research and investment into postpartum maternal health, including lactation and pumping, lags behind even other aspects of women's health—perhaps in part because postpartum health lacks its own specialty, and is instead awkwardly partitioned into obstetrics, pediatrics, and general family medicine.

Low-cost innovations of any kind are also notoriously difficult to commercialize. Beginning in 2010, Beth Kolko, an engineering professor at the University of Washington, collaborated with the M.I.T. Media Lab researcher Alexis Hope on the development of an inexpensive fetal-ultrasound device. When they pitched the device to ultrasound companies, the response was chilly. "We said, 'Here, you should just take what we've done,' and they said, 'No thank you, no thank you, no thank you,' " Kolko said. "Finally, someone took me aside and said, 'We could make cheaper technology, but it wouldn't support the cost of our sales force, so we have no motivation to do so.' "

The Times piece caught the attention of Hope and other Media Lab researchers. There had to be a way to make pumps quieter, or more elegant, or less painful without making them significantly more expensive. Maybe what the breast pump needed, the researchers thought, was a hackathon.

Hackathons, which began as communal coding marathons aimed at solving commercial-software problems, have in recent years been used to tackle health and humanitarian issues ranging from disaster response to the marketing of fair-trade products. Typically, hackathon participants are provided with basic fabrication tools—from 3-D printers to screwdrivers—and technical guidance as they work together on software or hardware solutions to some aspect of the problem at hand. The results are, in keeping with open-source tradition, made publicly available. The idea is not only to bring many different skills and perspectives together in service of unorthodox solutions but also to generate more effective—and potentially more marketable—solutions by involving prospective users from the start.

There are some striking success stories: Taarifa, a Web application developed at the 2012 World Bank-sponsored Sanitation Hackathon, is now being used in Tanzania to report and track the repair of life-threatening sanitation problems. But Willow Brugh, a fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center for the Internet and Society, who advised the organizers of the M.I.T. event, said that while public-interest hackathons are often very good at publicizing technical and social problems and generating novel ideas for solving them, hackathon success is no guarantee of commercial success. Some hackathons neglect to include potential users; others fail to help creators with funding and connections, instead letting ideas wither when the weekend ends. Some tackle problems that are simply too broad or complex ("Hack the New Orleans Murder Rate").

The breast-pump hackathon organizers had some advantages. Breast-pump companies small and large signed on, agreeing to send representatives and sponsor prizes. The organizers also had little trouble including product users: breast-pump users submitted more than a thousand ideas beforehand. And many of the technical experts who attended—engineers, designers, artists, medical professionals—were also exasperated breast-pump users eager to put improvements into practice, on or off the market. At a preliminary event at the M.I.T. Media Lab last spring, research assistant Tal Achituv quieted a breast-pump motor by filling its interior space with a block of foam. While such a tweak might not be commercially viable yet, he recognized that a downloadable design and simple instructions would enable many pump owners—including many event participants—to do it themselves.

On Sunday evening, after about twenty-four hours of furious activity, the hackathon teams presented their prototypes. Team Milk Pod displayed plans for a private lactation lounge that could be installed in public places; Team Snuggle demonstrated a baby-sling-like pump carrier designed to make the pumping experience more portable and less clinical; Team Second Nature explained that its pump uses both compression and suction to more closely mimic a baby's mouth and tongue. The winner—of three thousand dollars and a trip to Silicon Valley to pitch the idea to investors—was Team Batman, a group of engineers, health-care specialists, and parents who had convened around the idea of a portable, hands-free pump that could be used while commuting or caring for small children. Its members discussed and discarded backpack and bandolier designs before settling on the Mighty Mom Utility Belt, which holds bottles, an integrated pump, and a sensor that collects data on milk volume and fat content. Team member Kat Sniffen, an aerospace and mechanical engineer, said that such a pump would have allowed her to return to work more quickly after the birth of her first child, and to pump more frequently after the birth of her second.

Though Team Batman is already besieged with requests from prospective utility-belt users, most of its members met for the first time on Saturday morning, and they're not sure about their next steps. "None of us came into the weekend looking for a job," Sniffen said. "But we're going to figure out how to do something with this and make it awesome."

The hackathon didn't solve the maternal-leave problem; it didn't solve gender-inequality problems. The breast pump still sucks. But whether or not the weekend's results reach store shelves, the hackathon may have taken the breast pump a step closer to sucking as nature intended.