More than Words: Renovate and Revitalize

Inspiration: We gravitated towards this project because the values and goals of the More Than Words nonprofit resonated with us and allowed us to wholeheartedly brainstorm and bounce off ideas. Our inspiration behind our attachable and portable designs came from understanding the importance of the book carts being transportable and the implementation being low-cost or affordable. We thought it was a good idea to allow the carts to be customizable to their host’s preferences, because flexibility and more options on our end will only improve our relationship with current and new hosts.

What it does

The book cart facilitates cost-effective and sustainable hacking by utilizing readily available materials from common sites like Amazon. The design’s flexibility allows hosts to customize the carts according to their preferences, fostering a stronger relationship between the project and its hosts. It provides a cost breakdown and examples of listings with minimal parts for affordability, transportability, and adaptability.

How we built it:

Our output of this project was a mockup of attachable items that hosts can add to their More than Word’s cart, depending on their preferences and or business settings. We sought lightweight and flexible materials that can be added to the carts by first brainstorming what attachables could be useful to the existing carts. Next, we tried to find similar designs on online marketplaces to see if these attachables are readily available to install and implement without much hassle. We learned that most, if not all, of the equipment for our attachables can be found in many everyday shopping areas, online or in person. Then, we came up with a digital mockup of what these attachables could look like and how hosts can utilize individual pieces to make their own cart. We made various visual representations through Blender, a 3D animation software.

Challenges we ran into

Keeping the cart mobile while integrating the marketing materials was one of the biggest challenges we had to overcome. Designing a structure that has the capacity to hold up to 200 books, is visually appealing, and easily mobile took a lot of rough drafts. We overcame this by adding on extra parts that firstly, increases the surface area in which to put promotional materials without it looking crowded. Secondly, the additional parts are lightweight and detachable so it doesn't hinder the ease of transportation.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are very proud of each member of our team, we all worked together, sharing tasks and giving each other constructive feedback so we could deliver the best possible hack to the amazing More than Words non-profit. Furthermore we are excited with how our book cart mock ups turned out. It perfectly illustrates the versatility of our customization that is at the heart of our project. Moreover our hack isn't a far fetched idea but a user friendly solution that can be fastly implemented. Lastly we are extremely proud that we keep our hack well under budget. We were financially conscious from the beginning as we know how important it is to maximize every dollar nonprofits receive. So being able to submit a solution that did not compromise in quality while being affordable is something everyone in our team is proud of.