Inspiration
Many companies in America use planned obsolescence to get consumers to repeatedly buy low-quality items. Fast fashion makes it easy to impulsively buy without considering the quality or how long it can last. We wanted to make evaluating the quality and sustainability of an item as easy as buying fast fashion to make responsible consumption, UN Goal 12, more accessible.
What it does
EcoPulse is a website that analyzes the user’s potential purchase. Users will be informed of the quality, brand, and reviews, and be recommended more sustainable and higher-quality options within their price range. Afterwards, users can log the following purchasing decisions so they can keep track of their consumption. It will also be a browser extension that will open any time the user shops online. This makes it so that users won't have to remember to use EcoPulse. Users can also evaluate an item by pasting in the link of an item.
How we built it
We built our wireframing on Figma. We are coding the website on Visual Studio using JavaScript, HTML, and CSS, and we are using the React library.
Challenges we ran into
We had many technical challenges learning and using React. All of us are new to React and programming a website, so it was very overwhelming at first. But after watching some YouTube videos to learn, we figured it out and started to get a lot of code done. Finding a free AI model to include in our code was also hard. We at first wanted to include Open-AI, but after finding out it costs money, we did some more research and decided to continue with the Gemini AI. We also had a non-technical challenge of figuring out the direction of our idea. We started out wanting to focus more on overconsumption and helping the user decide if they need or will use the item long-term, but the user's bias will always make them decide that they will need the item. So, we transitioned to focusing on product obsolescence and the quality of the item.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Since starting to code was hard, we were really proud when we started to get a lot of code done, like the carousel that welcomes the user to the website. We were also proud that we got our ideas down and figured out by finishing our script for the pitch video.
What we learned
We learned about how to pitch and frame our problem and website as a solution. We not only learned how to use JavaScript, HTML, CSS, and React, but we also learned how to learn these skills on our own and find valuable resources we could use and learn from.
What's next for EcoPulse
We will finish coding the AI chatbot and combine our branches on GitHub to finally publish our app.
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.