Sextech Hackathon: Teaching Young Men About Consent

So what is Sextech? Thanks for asking. Sextech is the intersection between sexuality and technology. Think sex toys, sexual education, dating apps. After solo-travelling Asia and North America for 18 months before moving to Melbourne I was struck by just how progressive it's soul is, it is a place unafraid to challenge norms and encourages experimentation. That's why it was the perfect place to get some of Australia's creative minds finding solutions to some pretty important (and lucrative) topics.

I wish I could dive into it here but it'll take too long so let's jump into the topic our duo tackled.

The problem: At a certain age young boys have a strong drive to explore sex and sexuality, unfortunately family and school often provide poor guidance. Often, sex is not talked about and the most common way young boys learn about sex is by going online and finding porn. Porn is a poor way to understand the place of sex, the meaning of sex and perhaps most importantly it fails in a healthy and respectful way to teach the skill of sexual communication.

That's right, I did wrote the word porn on a linkedIn article. I proposed, that technology could be used to solve this problem through education. In a room that was 90% female (fantastic to see) Johnson approached me and said that as a father of two, with a 10 month old son, what I said really resonated with him.

The team: Mark Leyba (myself) & Johnson Kee

HMWS: How might we educate young men on the skill of sexual communication, in particular on the topic of consent?

Sexual communication was a very broad topic with many components. In the context of education we needed to narrow it down so that our MVP could focus on breaking down one topic and find the most relevant tech to solve the problem. As a result, we focused on consent a topic that several American states including California are now introducing into their high-school curriculum.

Given the time constraints, the size of the team, we aimed to focus on research, synthesis and ideation of a conceptual solution.

Research:

11 Interviews

2 Expert Analysis

Desktop Research

Key insights:

We discovered consent is extremely complex with wide and often conflicting definitions between individuals. Should we teach it in its full complexity? GIven our audience was young and that our eventual goal would be an MVP. We decided that we needed a simple and reliable definition that could be applied to all situations. That's why we chose the FRIES framework.

Freely Given

Reversible

Informed

Enthusiastic

Specific

Synthesis:

We synthesized a future state customer journey that illuminates the experience of going on a date for a young man. The customer journey illuminates that the points of consent are the points of greatest tension. They are the moments of vulnerability where the situation could go either way. These are situations that take courage and practice to do the right thing. They are the moments where sexual communications skills are crucial. What we were designing are the training wheels.

Ideation:

Using the customer journey as a starting point of ideation, we realized that teaching skills in high pressure situations are best done in closely simulated situations. Think aviation training, combat training, riding your bike with training wheels. These things are close simulations to the real thing so that when you are in the scenario you'll know how to make a decision and react. That's why we chose VR as the best solution to this design problem.

Below is a simplified user-flow where the user can run through a simulated date and practice recognizing and responding to points of consent. Be warned, given that we are teaching about sexual communication. I allude to sexual situations being viewed in VR in the user-flow.

In conclusion, it was a challenge and a lot of fun to dedicate most of a weekend researching, thinking and conceptualizing solutions to the problem of teaching sexual communication skills to young men. It was challenging, selecting a framework for such a complex concept. The tradeoff for the simplicity of FRIES is that it does not deal with all situations but it did provide a solid base and in the end that was our priority. Also, while we built the customer journey from research. The user-flow itself was based simply off the customer journey, this means that there will be infinite room for iteration and that probably wouldn't be what the user-flow looks like if we had another week.

We look forward to next years Sextech Hackathon and congrats to all everyone who was involved!