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Envirowise
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Home Page
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Info Page
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Planting!
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Globe Page
Inspiration
Our current climate state is dire, and we are facing an environmental crisis that threatens our planet and our way of life. The effects of climate change are already being felt globally - from uncommon Hawaii wildfires 2,207 structures damaged, rising sea levels, and melting glaciers. Furthermore, the average global temperature has increased by 1 degree Celsius since the pre-industrial era, sea levels have risen by about 8 inches since 1880, and the Arctic sea ice extent has decreased by 30% since 1979. Although current climate-focused websites emphasize the importance of addressing these major environmental concerns, there is a lack of entertainment and positive feedback from such websites. Introducing.. drumroll Envirowise, a gamified platform to encourage a prolonged healthy habit of recycling and donating unwanted items through an environmental logger and interactive infographics. In creating Envirowise, we hope to raise awareness of the climate crisis and inspire people to take action with increased sustainability efforts.
Research
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2352250X21000555: “gamification appears to be a promising avenue for preventing climate change”
- https://www.energy.gov/eere/renewable-energy
- https://www.epa.gov/watersense/statistics-and-facts#:~:text=Water%20Stats,gallons%20of%20water%20annually%20nationwide.
- “The average family can waste 180 gallons per week, or 9,400 gallons of water annually, from household leaks. That's equivalent to the amount of water needed to wash more than 300 loads of laundry.”
- “As much as 50 percent of the water we use outdoors is lost due to wind, evaporation, and runoff caused by inefficient irrigation methods and systems.”
What it does
Envirowise provides users with the opportunity to log their positive environmental impact by recycling and donating items in a gamified format. As users log more recycling and donation trips, they plant more trees, which will be displayed in their personalized landscapes. As users expand their landscape, they can unlock badges and show them off to the world! To learn more about environmental sustainability overall, users can navigate to the Info page where an interactive infographic will be displayed. Each bubble the user selects will teach them about the environmental consequences of their current actions, how to decrease their carbon footprint, and how to correctly recycle/donate unwanted items. In doing so, we hope to improve our community's knowledge of the three R’s: reduce, reuse, and recycle and increase our community’s overall focus on sustainability.
How we built it
We utilized Figma to design our application concept, and Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop to design our brand assets - logo, color scheme, and thumbnail.
Challenges we ran into
After creating our final mockups of Envirowise, we realized that our calendar toggle would disappear as we transitioned from August to September in the prototype section. We later learned that our prototype attempted to jump to a new page rather than switching to a different overlay of the same calendar variation. After realizing this issue, we created a smooth transition between the two months on the calendar toggle, which turned out great! In addition, we also ran into issues where items were clickable on our pages even though we did not want them to be. We later realized that as we reused design components from one page into another, the interactions were also duplicated. After fixing this issue, our user experience is more seamless when logging a recycling or donation activity.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Going into the creation of Envirowise, we had multitudes of ideas for how we can provide the best user experience and interactive platform for users to learn more about the environment. We are proud of our seamless user experience, which allows users to browse our application with ease. We are also proud of our green-focused color scheme and logo design to emulate our outdoor environment.
What we learned
On the technical side, we learned how to utilize Auto-Layout to provide more precise implementations of our design and wrapped layers. While learning this Figma skill was challenging initially, Auto-Layout proved to be useful when adding/removing design components through a grid-like structure. In addition, we also became more comfortable utilizing Figma master and child components to improve our workflow efficiency. On the hackathon theme side, we learned that environmental sustainability appears in many aspects of our lives from water and food to energy - all of which are daily things we consume/interact with every day. We can be more sustainable through simple acts of choosing reusable products over disposable items.
What's next for Envirowise
The team plans to continue to work on adding more design features for the mobile application to elevate our user experience. Some features include the following: Include further statistics and suggested articles to learn about the environment An environmental chatbot to gain personalized insight into how to improve your carbon footprint Expanded interactive tree map across the globe Bring further awareness and encouragement to more users on recycling and donating We had a lot of fun with Envirowise, and we cannot wait to see how the project grows 🌿
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