Circle

circle - logo

Inspiration

Circle is inspired by realising that consumers are key players in the circular economy. Circle hopes that through educating and helping consumers to be more responsible towards consumerism and have useful advice on end of life best practices this would also help businesses rethink. Overconsumption and overproduction are interlinked and reforming consumers' needs and desires, this should encourage businesses to reshape their business models in becoming more sustainable and contribute more to the circular economy.

What it does

Circle is a social media platform about sustainability, where businesses and users connect to facilitate and raise awareness about consumption and end of product life best practices. For this there are two target users; the consumer and company.

For consumer users, they can sign up to the platform can follow companies that support circular economy and find out how they do it. In addition, users can find products (low and high value) that they own and what they can do at the end of product life e.g. recycling services. They can add this to their product list to keep track, this is particularly useful for high-value products like electronics or automobiles. Other features like the carbon footprint meter allow consumers to track their carbon usages. This cumulated effort would trigger users to rethink their actions and educate them to be more aware of sustainability.

For company users, they are encouraged to create company profiles with detailed information of how they contribute and commit to being circular economical and also, post regularly about their latest news related to sustainability. By building their story and connecting with consumers, this would help them build customer loyalty and relationship specifically on sustainability ideas.

How we built it

Circle is a web app and for the purpose of the hackathan, the consumer user interfaces for phones and desktops are built to demonstrate the app.

The final products began by research and identifying a problem that needs solving. Through identifying a customer persona and understanding their needs, this led to the product functions and requirements. This followed a wireframe design and embodiment using Figma. This was then revamped for a higher fidelity prototype using Figma and React (javascript).

Challenges we ran into

One of the key challenges we faced during the process was deciding on the main product functions for our minimal viable prototype. We overcame this by understanding the customer needs thoroughly. Other challenges were our varied technical background which was resolved by pivoting from an app to a web app interface.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are extremely proud to have come together as a group with different technical backgrounds and created two working demos. The idea of understanding user needs and experiences and learning new skills was the biggest accomplishment.

What we learned

As a team, we not only developed our transferrable and technical skills but also learnt a lot more about circular economy and how everyone does play a major role in it!

What's next for Circle

So what's next for Circle? We hope that Circle could potentially come to live with further development and maturity. Despite, the demo showing global companies but we hope that this can be developed to support local businesses especially during the pandemic to help raise awareness of those as circular economy supporters are playing their part. This would hopefully also encourage more companies to be part of this movement. In addition, as we are coming out of lockdown, consumers would greatly benefit from this to make better shopping decisions and also supporting local businesses. At Circle, we believe this sustainable consumption movement is a great start to help support circular economy.