Overview
I attended an all-female Hackathon put together by Luma House in collaboartion with Cambridge Univiersity, where my team placed Second. We selected two topics from the hackathon’s challenge board and created two connected civic-tech solutions through 'Lattice'.
The Challenge
Political and legislative information is often filled with technical language, making it difficult for everyday voters to understand how decisions may affect them. It can also be challenging to check whether the public statements made by politicians, public figures and companies align with their affiliations, funding and actions.
Our challenge was to create accessible tools that could reduce political jargon while helping people investigate the information and relationships behind public claims.
We selected two challenges from the hackathon’s bingo board and used a rapid, user-centred design process to develop our solutions.
The Policy Translator allowed users to upload or paste a policy, bill or piece of legislation. It generated a plain-English summary explaining who was behind it, who it affected and what it meant. Users could add details such as their household income, family circumstances and whether they had children to receive a personalised impact assessment.
The Exposé Detector allowed users to research politicians, public figures and companies. It brought together their public statements, viewpoints, affiliations, funding sources and potential contradictions. The concept included a browser extension for quick context while reading online and a 3D relationship-mapping tool for deeper investigations.
We presented the concepts to members of the public and collected feedback on their clarity, usefulness and accessibility.
Reflections
The project strengthened my skills in rapid prototyping, user research and collaborative problem-solving under time constraints. It also highlighted the responsibility involved in creating AI tools about public figures and political information.
If developed further, the platform would need clear sourcing, safeguards against misleading AI-generated claims and a transparent way for users to distinguish verified facts from potential contradictions. Placing second demonstrated the strength of our concept, but the most valuable outcome was learning how thoughtful technology could help people engage with politics more confidently.
Findings
Our project showed the value of presenting complex political information in a clear, accessible and verifiable format. Finishing second demonstrated the strength of Lattice’s concept and highlighted opportunities to expand it through multilingual support, historical context, monitoring alerts and collaborative fact-checking.