pulito.
Building a community of good-doers of the environment
Hackathon | St. Paul's Environmental Design Challenge
Role | Asset Designer, UI Designer
Duration | 12 hours, March 2019
Tools | Illustrator, Figma, InVision
Overview
Background
On March 15th the University of Waterloo’s St. Paul’s College hosted an Environmental Design Challenge. This event was sponsored by Environmental and Climate Change Canada. ECCC developed their Pollution Prevention (P2) Resource Finder; it is described as “Canada's one-stop database of online pollution prevention resources.”
P2 Finder Paint Point
The P2 finder enables individuals to find practical pollution prevention tips, tools, and guidance to make more sustainable choices in their everyday life. It includes articles and small “hacks” that eliminate waste and encourages sustainability. The P2 finder can be accessed on the Government of Canada website, but it can still be inaccessible due to the update of our technologies and ways of accessing information.
Challenge: How might we create a mobile digital solution to empower youth and those that interact with youth engage with pollution prevention information?
Research
Target
As the challenge outlined the importance of “youth participation” we thought that the “youth” is a large and vague market. We decided to focus on a specific kind of youth where they are in the middle of learning to live an independent life, turning their focus not only their education but their well-being – university students residing on campus (residents).
As university students ourselves, we are constantly learning how to become independent and continuously try to find ‘hacks’ to make our everyday lives easier. If we targeted individuals who are always curious and in a time of their lives where they are figuring things out, we can help them develop good habits especially in the realm of pollution prevention choices.
Student values
From further reserach personal experiences, there are five things that the student market values the most:
- 1. Receiving fairly good passsing grades
- 2. Having friendly competition with fellow classmates and peers
- 3. Being aware current trends and events on campus
- 4. Shock factor (sometimes the unexpected has positive outcomes!)
Must haves
Ideation
Pokemon Go & Cineplex Timeplay
Pokemon Go uses augmented reality for users to play the game while interacting their surroundings. This makes users more active and willing to go outside as all as collaborate with other app users to complete a challenge. Pokemon Go's interactivity with one's surroundings inspired my team and I to also integrate that into our solution.
Ideation
We personally navigated through the P2 website and read the articles provided pollution prevention activities as well that we can possibly incorporate into the P2 app. We understand the market as WE are the market, we used our personal experiences (as students) and compared what pollution prevention choices we’ve made and continuously make we had Felix, our teammate and former don / student leader; share his experience living in a residence as a don and the influence he has, simply because he is a student lead.
We moved to the whiteboard and began brainstorming our design system and overall design of our app solution:
I then started making rough designs for our UIs and app logo as we determined our app name: Pulito, which is a direct Italian transalation of clean.
Solutions
Results
Pulito encourages building a community of good doers of the environment. This game-like, competitive app will have friends and family go head to head in using less pollutant-based products.
Building a community of good-doers of the environment.
This is a mobile app holds weekly competition among groups of friends to see who used the least amount of plastic or pollutant-based products based on groceries bought.
Check your plastics so that it doesn't become problematic!
Its as easy as taking a selfie, but with your groceries! Using your cell-phone camera it will scan via barcode and identify products and its information to determine its type and scale of pollutant. The lower the amount of pollutant-based products bought the better!
Don't know the food item's packaging material? Search it up!
You can even search up each food item manually to determine its packaging material which would also determine your Pulito points based on the packaging material.
The pollution prevention finder is your friend!
Read more articles to learn how else you can reduce waste with grocery shopping or how to simply live a little-to-no waste lifestyle. Learning more about the products in your cart, via articles from the P2Finder’s database, educate the user of the environmental impacts but as well as compete in a game of knowledge: post-session quiz games between your friends and your team (and other app users) would make the app even more fun! They’re able to track their consumption and use of pollutants, being knowledgeable of their use and impacts especially with the help of P2 articles alike.
Teamwork makes the environmental impact work!
You can team up with your roomates and friends to collaborate and attempt to reduce as much waste as they can in their everday life, starting with groceries. This team effort can make waste-reductions fun and effective due to its friendly-competition. The more participation, the more pulito points, more waste is reduced!
Weekly waste-reducing challenges that you'd want to keep doing!
Easy and doable weekly challenges that would increase your Pulito points each completion! Each challenge is also followed by articles from P2Finder’s database. They get to share their achievements and learn their P2 ways of living through easy weekly task.
Visual design
Final thoughts
Takeaways
The EDC challenge was a very fun experience overall; I’ve learned that we have many pollution preventions options to choose from that can help make a difference no matter how small they are. This design challenge helped me understand and realize the many resources we have available to us, it’s only a matter of its ease of accessibility and legibility. No matter how much information we’d like to include within our app or we will be including when integrating P2.
Designing
Two words: Design Systems! Sometimes being in the thick of the competition, you get lost in the challenge, designing whatever “looks good” rather than what works best for the user. When we began designing the app, I started to go haywire! From the navigation bar to what kind of button it should have or whether it should have an off shadow with the images, pointless design thinking because I was really focused on how it looked rather than its system. I ended up creating screens that were not needed and did not pertain to our idea, the UIs became inconsistent! We learned the importance of having a solid design system to follow so that we do not forget any screens or make unnecessary ones.
Next steps
As we continuously create and innovate, we also continue to mindlessly make pollutive choices – we hope to integrate Pulito or something of a similar application and practice in our everyday lives soon. We hope to involve more stakeholders for research, testing and design phases as well as explore more design solutions to guarantee its use and reliability. We hope to expand our market from University or College Residence to families (at home challenges, family-based) and then to an industry of some sort such as competition between restaurants etc.
