Re-FABric: Fashionably Sustainable

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  The Re-FABric logo

Inspiration

We are inspired by our peers around us who are becoming more conscious of the issues caused by climate change and are doing their best to help the environment. Despite their efforts, we often still see waste being placed in the wrong garbage bin and materials that can still be used being thrown out. We realize it may not always be easy to know how to properly dispose of materials or know when they should be reduced, reused, or recycled, and so, we wanted to make the process of disposing waste easier by educating the public more on proper waste disposal. Due to this generation’s love for thrifting and developing new trends, we decided to center our Re-FABric app around used clothes to help users decide on what to do with their old clothes.

What it does

To make recycling and upcycling clothes easier, we decided to create an app that allows you to take pictures of articles of clothing, and then suggests ways to either properly dispose of them or to reuse them. These suggestions help to avoid potentially reusable or recyclable products going to waste in the landfill, as well as provide creative ways to give your clothes a new life! If you choose to donate an item of clothing, a list of nearby donation centers will be provided based on a given address. Since our focus is on clothes disposal, the app will help you keep track of the clothes you have thrown away or donated and also allow you to see your impact on waste reduction!

How we built it

The Cats That Hack team split into two parts: a prototyping sub-team and a programming sub-team. We wanted to demonstrate how our app would function through prototyping as well as showcase the potential functionalities through actual code.

We built our prototype on Figma. Most of the app design is inspired from the free templates on the internet (links are provided in the project). We also watched a bunch of tutorial videos on Youtube to understand the various functions on Figma.

The app was programmed using Kivy, a module that can be used in Python to develop applications. While it is incomplete, we wanted to demonstrate some of the basic functionalities of our app, specifically the camera feature in which users can scan their clothing items in order to receive suggestions from the app on sustainable ways to recycle their goods and a search directory that lists local donation centers, based on the location of the user. The programming team downloaded Kivy and its packages and used the Kivy documentation, YouTube tutorials, and questions others had asked on online forums to learn where to start with their program and how to tackle any issues.

Challenges we ran into

At the very beginning of this hackathon, the Cats That Hack team realized that we weren’t very experienced in hackathons and developing technological projects, leaving us feeling stumped and confused about how to tackle this hackathon. We decided to have a quick brainstorming session with a mentor and realized the possibilities of what we could do with technology and how to implement our ideas. As we learned each others’ skill sets, the team split off into two.

The main challenge for the prototyping team was learning Figma from the beginning since they were very new to the software. It took them a while to get used to identifying and learning each technique such as connecting different screens through buttons in the application to establish its flow; however, they were able to deal with this challenge with the help of the Elle Hacks Figma workshop and Youtube videos.

The programming team of Cats That Hack struggled with developing the Re-FABric application as they learned how to use the Kivy framework through an already-familiar language, Python. As they wanted to incorporate ambitious features into the app such as a camera and Google search function, it was extremely difficult learning how to tackle these problems as they didn’t have enough time to thoroughly read through documentation to understand the full operation and functionality of the code they used. Additionally, given that there were no mentors experienced in Kivy, they realized that they had to rely on their problem-solving skills and answers they could salvage on the internet. It was much trial and error, especially during the design portion of the app as they continuously ran their program every 5 seconds to see how any minor changes impacted the application.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Our greatest accomplishment is learning how to use new tools we have never used before to create our project, and it was a huge learning curve. The majority of the hackathon was spent understanding Figma and Kivy. We’re proud of ourselves for managing to create an app while also having fun learning together during the hackathon. We’re also glad that we’re able to comfortably talk and support each other during the learning process. Although our app is not perfect (at the moment), we’re glad we’re able to overcome most of the challenges we faced while learning during the limited time we had in the hackathon.

What we learned

With minimal coding experience, Senuvi and Helen put their efforts into designing a user-friendly app to the best of their abilities. Although they had never used Figma before, they learned how to create buttons, design an app, create different pages, and overall develop a prototype that effectively communicates its mission with its users. They also learned how to connect the different components of the app together to create clickable buttons that will lead the user to the wide variety of functions that the app provides.

Coming in with first-year coding experience in Python, Alice and Leanne pushed their programming and computer science skills by learning a new Python module and framework that they didn’t know existed until Friday evening of the hackathon. They learned how to implement and manage a ScreenManager system in order to establish a flow between different screens, how to incorporate a camera and Google search feature within their app, and how to stylize it as best as they could, all within the short timeframe of 24 hours.

It was a fun learning experience for everyone in the Cats that Hack team. We’re glad to be able to help each other out!

What's next for Re-FABric: Fashionably Sustainable

There’s still lots of room for improvement on the app and as a team. As we learn more about coding and gain more experience, we hope to include more functions to the app. During our brainstorming process we came up with many interesting ideas for it. However, due to the time constraints we focused our app on used-clothes only. We hope to widen the scope of our project in the future by including disposal information on different kinds of trash that people throw out such as cell phones, batteries, pills, food waste, etc. We hope to reduce the amount of trash that ends up in the landfill and hopefully educate people on becoming more sustainable.

Built With

• figma
• kivy
• python