CMU Furniture Forward

Poster

Inspiration

During spring move out, tons of usable furniture is left in the dumps, all because students have no other way to deal with it, we wanted to fix this.

What it does

CMU Furniture Forward allows students to donate their used furniture, where it will be stored and posted for sale for other undergraduate students. Then, students will receive their purchased items at the beginning of the following school year.

How we built it

We created a form for students to upload their items, from there we use the excel sheet to create a Shopify site and an item inventory. The site allows students to shop for and see the different items available. The inventory allows workers to find and keep track of the furniture. At the end of the summer, a list of purchased furniture is retrieved from Shopify, and workers will sort out the furniture based on living community. Then, the furniture will be returned to campus for its new owners.

Challenges we ran into

We had issues with images saving as a sharepoint link, which will cause issues for uploading to Shopify and for allowing other students to access. We were able to resolve this by limiting the check-in students to Central Sustainability, and sharing the image folder with them, and using a Microsoft add-on tool to help with Shopify. In addition, we struggled to keep things automated in order to keep labor/upkeep costs low. This also impacted the scale of the project, as we limited it to undergraduate on-campus students only limited to a few delivery days.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of reaching out to Brad Brookens, the Manager of Central Store/Warehouse Operations, he was incredibly helpful and told us that this could actually happen. We even talked to the Central Sustainability team, who gave us great input on how we could actually implement this. Lastly, we sought advice from the SGA President who provided useful information on the possible new green fee. It seemed like everyone was really proud of what we created and had hope of something similar being implemented in the future.

What we learned

We learned about the power of automation and upkeep. Focusing on processes that needed to be automated was difficult, it limits cheaper and sometimes better options. Upkeep severely limited how much we can do for our project. It would be wonderful to have drop off at every individual dorm and apartment, but it just isn't possible. However, we learned a lot on how this process would work from professionals. We are all walking away with new knowledge on how to create a new and innovative project while on a limited budget.

What's next for CMU Furniture Forward

Next, we would add graduate and off-campus students to the picture. As well as opening up the warehouse for students to drop off/pick up items and even deliveries/pickups in both the Fall and Spring. The more students that show interest and donate their furniture, the larger this project becomes.