ENVoyage

Pointing the way to eco-friendly tourism!

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Inspiration

Hawaii is one of the most popular tourist destinations in the world, but being a top destination comes at a price. With more tourists comes an overwhelming demand on resources, reducing the quality of life for residents through issues such as unequal distribution of said resources, as well as environmental degradation. This has only worsened with the post-pandemic travel boom. Recently, the effects of over-tourism have been brought to the attention of social media communities as locals express their outrage towards the tourists' lack of respect for the local environment. Given these events, we were inspired to create ENVoyage as a way to help tourists continue to explore countries in a more eco-friendly manner, starting with choice of transportation and the reduction of air pollution.

What it does

Our application promotes greener alternatives for transportation to our clients as they travel across the world. Connecting them to local public transportation, car-pooling services, bike rental services, and more at a discounted price, we encourage tourists to seek more eco-friendly ways to make their way to and from each point of their itinerary.

How we built it

We built a high fidelity interactive prototype through Figma detailing the functions of our application with examples. We also looked into using plugins to help us realize the interactivity and ideal user experience we were looking for in our final product. We then proceeded to implement the application using Java and Android Studio. Due to the time constraints, we were not able to implement all the functions required for the app to run as desired, but we focused on connecting each frame in the application, and trying to develop the search function that would allow users to specify the location they would like more information on, as these are some of the more crucial components to the app’s functionality.

Challenges we ran into

Environmental issues have a very broad scope. It was difficult for our group to narrow our ideas down to one particular environmental element, as effects of over-tourism are reflected in water pollution, air pollution, urbanization, and so much more. Not focusing on one specific issue made the problem seem so large that it felt as if it were impossible to solve with the constraints we were given. Luckily, with the guidance of mentors and inspiration drawn from recent events, we were able to brainstorm a solution to a smaller part of the bigger problem. Furthermore, hoping to try something new during the hackathon, we spent a lot of time trying to learn to develop a webapp with languages we had no previous experience with (namely Flutter and Dart). We were having trouble applying what little knowledge we had of these languages to bring our visions to life, and so, considering the time constraints, we decided to start over with some tools we were already familiar with, making the best of the time we had left.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of our ability to think outside of the box” We feel that we took a more creative approach to our interpretation of the challenges (and similarly, our solution to the challenge), which we believe sets us apart from various other teams. We are also proud of being able to work as a team. We had a variety of ideas and input throughout our brainstorming process, but through respecting each other's opinions and evaluating all our options objectively, we were able to put the ideas together without conflict.

What we learned

In addition to discovering new functionalities of development tools we had previously used, we learned (the hard way) about the significance of a well-defined objective and outline prior to implementation, especially if we want to generate the best results within a time limit. While creating the project for this hackathon, we spent a good amount of time on ideation, but still struggled to narrow down the problem to something we could create a specific technological solution to. We tried to go forward in the implementation with a vague idea of our solution, but found that the lack of specificity made it difficult to know what exactly we were trying to do. It took a lot of trial and error before we realized that our problem was our lack of a clear objective. After taking some time to rethink our goals, with a better idea of what we're working towards, we were able to make faster progress in the development of our solution.

What's next for ENVoyage

The effects of over-tourism are more than just environmental — they are also social issues, and we hope to be able to address that as well. So project-wise, we plan to expand our services past transportation into areas such as touristic activities. For instance, we have considered forming a partnership with local businesses to promote the local economy so that it isn’t as dependent on tourism. Individually, we believe we all still have much to learn. There are many software tools we feel could have been used to better implement our idea (like our initial plan to use Flutter and Dart), and as we build up our skillset, we hope to be able to improve on the functionalities of our application and alleviate the repercussions of an ever-expanding tourism industry.

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