Gaia

It all started when a man in Boise, Idaho said, "I wish I could see the impact my eating habits have on the environment," so we thought, what if? Gaia is a carbon footprint tracking app that helps the user reduce their greenhouse gas emissions one meal at a time. We help the user visualize the impact their eating habits have on the planet. We currently live in a society that encourages consumption, its time to change that. It's time to reward the reduction of consumption.

Gaia plans to expand the functionality of the app by introducing transportation, energy and product consumption branches. We want users to build a community around them while competing to lower their emissions as a whole. It is a change in lifestyle and visualization that will lead to the overall reduction of emissions.

The first iteration allows the user to go through and input the food they ate. This will then return a number of points that corresponds to the amount of greenhouse gas emissions they have used. It encourages users to reduce their emissions by finding alternative meals that require less emissions to prepare. We gamified the concept by giving the user a tree that grows gradually as they cut down on their emission, utilizing streaks, points and communities to keep the user coming back.

We wanted to create an algorithm that correctly weighted points based on actual greenhouse gas emissions, but no one knew how to create an algorithm. After some research, one of our members created a weighted distribution of points that corresponds to the actual emissions and then translates that into an in game amount of points.

None of us knew how to program so we are extremely proud of having a beautiful wireframe that explains what the user does at each step of the way. We all worked on our strengths which are design, marketing and analytics. This produced a great first product that we can use to demo the concept of our idea!