DOBINET - Your Cabinet Manager

Inspiration

Nowadays, the rapid-changing fashion trend and enormous amount of information on outfit styling from all over the globe teach us more about “what to buy” and “where to buy” new clothes, but not the important topic of making full uses of “what we already have” and “where to donate the stuff we no longer need”. As a member of the bigger community, we are facing more and more environmental problems resulting from the massive fast-fashion production. As an individual, avoiding unconsciously spending more than planned or expected on repetitive or unnecessary stuff is also a lifelong lesson to learn in income management. To help people better manage their closet in a simple and fun way, we created this new application called “DOBINET” which is the combination of “Donate” and “Cabinet”.

What it does

Our application is called “DOBINET” which is the direct combination of the word “Donate” and “Cabinet”. It is a digital cabinet which contains the data of users’ clothes, and it takes records of what the user wears each day. Based on our algorithms, it analyzes the frequency of a specific piece’s appearance in the user’s daily outfits, tracks the last-worn date, and eventually gives recommendations on which items the user could consider donating to charity organizations. Specifically, we could break down the current functionality of DOBINET into three parts. 1) An OOTD (Outfit-Of-The-Day) image calendar. People could simply upload one picture a day to create this image calendar as a special diary that records what we wear everyday. 2) An online database storing the information about the user’s clothes. While uploading the daily outfit picture to the calendar, the application will require the user to select a category and give a name of the major items that appear in the image. The data about each item will be saved into this database which serves as an “online closet” for each user. In real situations, when people are out shopping, due to the relative fixed aesthetics on clothing styles, sometimes we see items that look attractive but also similar to something we already have. At these moments, we could simply open this “online closet” , give a check, and do a comparison. This functions to better help people make rational and comprehensive decisions. 3) An analyst that keeps track of the date and times over a specific period that the user wears each item and ultimately gives donation suggestions. We have different standards for checking whether an item is no longer “favorited” or “frequently used” by the user. We would add the least-used items in a time period to the Donate-Recommendation List, so that the user could choose to donate if it’s useless now, or would be reminded about the existence of this item.

How we built it

The tech stack we used - Flutter for android development. The user has to upload the pictures, in the form of mirror selfie for example and then the app will save those images for future reference and help users make a better decision on whether or not to buy clothes of similar kind. Features of our app: One of the important aspects of the app is to help users avoid buying and adding the same outfits in their closet. Another important feature of the app is that the user can either donate their clothes or get the clothes from the community page of the app.

Challenges we ran into

Learning flutter and using it to implement our app, in the limited time Deciding on various issues a user face with respect to managing their wardrobe and trying to find a solution to help them.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We’ve accomplished the implementation of uploading images. The user can browse through their album and choose those OOTP photos to upload to our application. We have also made progress on different subpages (calendar, closet, and community).

What we learned

We have been working with Flutter for our project, therefore, each of us took a decent amount of time to learn the basics of building an Android Application using dart in Flutter. Some features that we’ve learnt include how to structure a page from scratch and setting up the bottom navigation bar that leads to different subpages (calendar, closet, and community). We have also implemented the function of uploading pictures of an outfit.

What's next for DOBINET - Your Cabinet Manager

If we’re given more time, we would like to take the time to further improve the functionality of our application. One feature we could focus on is community. Our ideal community subpage would be an exchange place where people can navigate through what they want to donate or get from other people. Based on the frequency for the collection of clothes, the app should make reasonable suggestions to the user about what item they are probably not needed and then the pieces can go to donation. We could also implement a function in which the app can auto-detect the clothes in each uploaded picture. It should also distinguish those that are already in our database. Furthermore, a social network in which user can import image from their Instagram posts would greatly increase the likelihood that they will keep using the application.