Land of a Thousand Hills Collectibles

System Architecture
the physical marketing kit

Inspiration 💡

Every time a customer goes to Land of a Thousand Hills Cafe, every dollar they spend goes back directly into their community to provide services to homeless youth. This is an incredibly important and beautiful narrative, and we wanted to find a way to connect people to the positive impact of their everyday actions (even something like buying a cup of coffee).

How it works ️🤔

We created 5 unique, collectible cards that can be handed out by the cafe with purchases above a set amount. One side of the card contains a catchy one-liner connecting the coffee and impact (e.g. “Your coffee did some good today”). The other side is printed with a content-drive message that conveys a direct impact and describes work being done by Haven (e.g. “Haven helped arrange permanent housing for 341 homeless youth in 2022”)

Desktop Preview	Mobile Preview

Each card is also printed with a unique letter, and together all 5 cards spell out ‘HAVEN’. Customers are encouraged to collect all the cards and receive a free, laser-engraved wooden token when they collect all 5.

SysArch

There is also a digital version of the cards that can be accessed through a QR code; a custom QR code stamp can be used by employees to stamp customer’s cups, and if they scan the code they will be brought to this digital version. In addition, there is a separate landing page that contains the QR code that the non-profit can use to advertise these cards digitally.

How we built it ⚙️

Marketing cards were designed on Canva. They were printed in colour, and prototypes were made using construction paper and glue sticks to create a ‘real card’ feel.
The QR code stamp was designed using CAD software and printed using Markforged 3D printers available on-site.
The wooden tokens were designed as image files and latter converted into vector format, so that they could be burned into wood using a laser engraver.
The digital component was completed by a partner working remotely from India and integrated into the physical aspects of the project.

Design 🎨

We were heavily inspired by the revised version of Double Diamond design process, which not only includes visual design, but a full-fledged research cycle in which you must discover and define your problem before tackling your solution & then finally deploy it.

Double-Diamond

Discover: a deep dive into the problem we are trying to solve.

Define: synthesizing the information from the discovery phase into a problem definition.

Develop: think up solutions to the problem.

Deliver: pick the best solution and build that.

Moreover, we utilized design tools like Figma, Photoshop & Illustrator to prototype our designs before doing any coding. Through this, we are able to get iterative feedback so that we spend less time re-writing code.

Challenges we ran into 😰

Individuals on the team did not have significant front-end technical experience, and setting up the digital component was a challenge.
Printing the QR Code stamp took around 18 hours (significantly longer than expected), and pushed back our submission video timeline.
With so many moving parts and different aspects to the project, making sure they all stayed on track within the timeline was challenging, as well as ensuring that they all worked within the singular marketing narrative we were pursuing.

Besides, handling CORS was extremely annoying, and it alone consumed a lot of time in the process. But somehow we managed to ship it in time.

Accomplishments that we're proud of ✨

This project brings together so many different kinds of innovation and expertise, ranging from technical programming, to digital design and engineering, to marketing. The synergy and complementing experience that we had on our team contributed to creating a truly unique product. We are proud of finishing the project on time which seemed like a tough task initially. We were also able to add most of the features that we envisioned for the app during ideation. And as always, working overnight was pretty fun! :)

What we learned 🙌

Proper sleep is very important! :p Well, a lot of things, both summed up in technical & non-technical sides. Also not to mention, we enhanced our googling and Stackoverflow searching skills during the hackathon :)

What's next for Land of a Thousand Hills Collectibles 🚀📈

We hope that the marketing project (or some least aspects of it) will provide Land Of a Thousand Hills and Haven with tools that they can implement and help them achieve their organization goals. Additionally, we intend to continue improving the image compression algorithms to ensure seamless & fast operation under any situations.