Visible work: housework balancer for people living together

This app balances housework between housemates, couples, etc. Against the huge gender gap in sharing chores, we raise awareness of the actual value of housework by making invisible work visible.

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Track

We are submitting to the Inequality track.

Inspiration

Despite the rise in women's employment rate and contribution to public economy, there is still an enormous gender gap in housework. Women not only work on paid jobs in the market, but also do way more chores for free than men.
So far, housework is largely unnoticed, unpaid, and unrewarded. To raise awareness of the actual value and price of housework, and to fairly compensate those who do extra housework than their counterparts, we made the Visible Work app.

What it does

Visible Work helps co-living people split housework between them, either by splitting equally and trading tasks afterwards, or assigning a task to a user following mutual agreement in the household. This step makes invisible housework more visible, especially to the user who is less aware of the existence of certain chores.

Then, the app sends reminders to the task assignee. This gives the user who usually does less chores a gentle nudge to keep their commitment to fairly sharing chores.

Finally and most importantly, the app helps determine a fair price for housework tasks. Users are able to define a fee for a chore by reaching an agreement within the household, or the app will suggest a "fair price" of the chore based on task type, work hours, and local housekeeping market price.

The app then calculates the Housework Balance of each user, indicating which user did more than their equal share of chores, and how much the extra chores are worth in terms of market value. Every time the Housework Balance exceeds an agreed-on value, the other users in the household must pay the due compensation to the user who did more housework.

How we built it

We built this multi-platform app with the Flutter framework.

Challenges we ran into

It is the first time we try to use Flutter, so there's a lot of learning going on.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Learned the basics of Flutter.

What we learned

Flutter is hard :)

What's next for Visible work: housework balancer for people living together

  • allow user to rate each other's housework quality
  • photo upload with timestamp as evidence of completing housework on time
  • add housework tips page, for users new to housework
  • enable auto transfer the Housework Balance between checking account of users via checkbook API

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